C-NRLF 


ON  AMERICAN  BOOKS 
F.  Hackett 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
DAVIS 


THE    FREEMAN     PAMPHLETS 


ON  AMERICAN  BOOKS 

Edited  by 

FRANCIS  HACKETT 

A  symposium  by  five  American  critics 
as  printed  in  the  London  Nation 


NEW  YORK 

B.   W.   HUEBSCH,  INC. 

M  C  M  X  X 


ON  AMERICAN  BOOKS 

Edited  by 

FRANCIS  HACKETT 

A  symposium  by  five  American  critics 
as  printed  in  the   London  Nation 


NEW    YORK 

B.  W.  HUEBSCH,  INC. 
MCMXX 


LIBRARY 

UNI\£-PSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
DAVIS  / 


COPYRIGHT,  1920,  BY 
B.  W.  HUEBSCH,  INC 


PRINTED  IN  THE  U.  S.  A. 


The  contents  of  this  pamphlet  appeared  as  an 
American  supplement  to  the  London  Nation  in 
April,  1920.  It  was  edited  by  Mr.  Francis  Hackett 
after  conversation  with  Mr.  Massingham,  editor  of 
the  Nation,  during  the  latter's  visit  to  America.  It 
seemed  to  both  men  that  a  presentation  to  the  Brit 
ish  of  the  state  of  letters  in  America  would  not  be 
untimely. 

By  arrangement  with  Mr.  Massingham,  and  with 
the  consent  of  the  authors  who  were  good  enough 
to  restore  their  respective  articles  to  their  original 
form,  Americans  may  now  see  their  literature  as  in 
a  mirror.  In  fairness  to  the  writers,  the  reader  is 
reminded  that  these  papers  were  prepared  quickly, 
for  purposes  of  a  weekly  publication  and  with  a 
view  to  stimulating  interest  rather  than  to  give  final 
judgments.  As  artists  they  were  reluctant  to  assent 
to  this  reprint,  but  they  yielded  to  persuasion  good- 
naturedly. 

September,  1920. 


CONTENTS 

_  PAGE 

AMERICAN  CRITICISM  TO-DAY  .  by  J.   E.  Spingarn  .     5 

RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY    .   by  Padraic    Colum  .    15 

THE  LITERARY  CAPITAL  OF 

THE  UNITED  STATES  .      .      .  by  PL  L.  Mencken  .   31 

PHILOSOPHY  IN  AMERICA    .      .  by  Morris  R.  Cohen  .   39 

THE  AMERICAN  NOVEL  .      .      .  by  Francis  Hackett  .  52 


American  Criticism  To-Day 

AN  American  swashbuckler  of  letters  has  described 
what  is  probably  the  Englishman's  view  of  Amer 
ican  criticism.  "  The  typical  literary  product  of  the 
country,"  he  says,  "  is  still  a  refined  essay  in  the 
Atlantic  Monthly,  by  Emerson,  so  to  speak,  out  of 
Charles  Lamb,  the  sort  of  thing  one  might  look  to 
be  done  by  a  somewhat  advanced  English  curate." 
And  if  Englishmen  go  to  the  Atlantic  Monthly 
and  similar  journals  for  America's  outlook  on  life 
or  letters,  that  is  the  sort  of  thing  they  will  often 
find. 

Only  too  much  of  American  criticism  is  still  of  this 
character  —  the  work  of  men  escaping  from  diffi 
culties  by  the  half-hearted  methods  of  reasonable 
compromise  that  serve  well  enough  in  politics,  but 
fail  in  the  arts,  where  all  depends  on  what  Keats 
called  a  "  fine  excess,"  even  when  the  excess  is  that 
compression  and  restraint  which,  according  to  Goe 
the,  proves  the  master.  Creative  work  of  real 
power,  with  the  real  tang  and  gusto  of  American 
life,  reaches  Europe  often  enough,  but  only  critics 
of  the  most  thin,  timid,  and  derivative  type  seem 
able  to  find  any,  even  if  a  rather  condescending,  audi 
ence,  in  England. 

In  America  of  late  the  critics  have  more  than  will 
ingly  grouped  themselves  according  to  the  standards 
of  Old  and  New.  On  the  surface  the  point  at  issue 

5 


6  J.E.    SPINGARN 

sometimes  seems  almost  a  question  of  geography: 
Does  the  Muse  prefer  the  climate  of  New  England 
or  the  Middle  West?  Is  it  Pegasus,  or  a  screech 
owl,  that  is  now  hovering  over  Chicago?  But  at 
bottom  it  is  the  old  problem  of  the  literary  influence 
of  Europe,  and  how  far  the  new  America  is  to  cut 
loose  from  the  older  and  more  derivative  literature 
of  New  England.  It  is  not  wholly  a  new  question, 
for  it  has  mildly  agitated  men's  minds'ever  since  the 
Declaration  of  Independence,  and  over  seventy  years 
ago,  in  the  jingling  rhymes  of  his  "  Fable  for 
Critics,"  Lowell  stated  some  of  its  aspects  clearly 
enough. 

The  older  critics  of  to-day,  those  who  have  for 
some  time  spoken  with  the  most  authority,  have 
scarcely  concerned  themselves  with  this  problem. 
They  have  conceived  of  themselves  as  citizens  of  a 
Republic  of  Letters  in  which  geographical  bound 
aries  seemed  almost  literary  accidents.  They  have 
defined  these  boundaries  often  enough,  but  without 
any  personal  sense  of  their  relation  to  them.  Mr. 
Brownell,  whether  in  u  French  Traits  "  or  "  Amer 
ican  Prose  Masters,"  is  alike  carrying  on  the  tradi 
tions  of  the  best  French  criticism,  with  its  modeled 
phrases  and  its  clearness  of  architectonic,  though 
with  less  of  its  clearness  in  the  substance  of  his 
thought.  Mr.  Woodberry,  in  "  The  Heart  of 
Man,"  "  The  Torch,"  and  "  Masters  of  Literature," 
is  an  inheritor  of  the  Lowell  tradition,  in  whom,  de 
spite  many  new  influences,  New  England  idealism  car 
ries  on  its  appointed  task  of  illuminating  the  meeting- 
point  of  art  and  life.  His  biographies  of  Emerson 
and  Hawthorne  have  few  equals  among  the  briefer 


AMERICAN    CRITICISM    TO-DAY        7 

histories  of  literary  lives;  and  the  best  of  his  essays 
on  the  great  writers  have  a  unity  and  lift  that  make 
many  of  Lowell's  seem  those  of  a  shrewd  but  old- 
fashioned  amateur.  Mr.  Huneker,  in  u  Icono 
clasts  "  and  u  Egoists,"  is  the  irresponsible 
dilettante,  for  whom  all  the  arts  are  an  equal  obses 
sion,  with  a  curiosity  and  flair  for  what  is  really  dis 
tinctive  wherever  he  may  find  it,  but  with  much  of 
Remy  de  Gourmont's  interest  in  not  obviously  essen 
tial  detail.  But  perhaps  least  "  American  "  of  all 
to  an  Englishman  (for  Englishmen  have  a  very 
special  conception  of  what  an  American  should  be) 
will  appear  Professor  Santayana's  "  Interpretations 
of  Poetry  and  Religion "  and  "  Three  Religious 
Poets,"  the  work  of  a  Harvard  philosopher  for 
whom  criticism  has  been  merely  an  incident  in  a 
remarkable  career,  and  who  writes  always  with  a 
high-bred  and  subtle  distinction  not  unlike  Cardinal 
Newman's.  Whether  he  is  concerned  with  Lucre 
tius  or  Dante,  Shakespeare  or  Goethe,  he  has  New 
man's  gift  of  at  once  illuminating  and  yet  obscuring 
his  subject.  He  broods  with  delicate  pleasure  and 
a  keen  mind  over  these  greatest  of  writers;  but  the 
work  of  more  modern  men  —  men  no  more  modern 
than  Whitman  and  Browning  —  seems  to  him  the 
"  poetry  of  barbarism." 

There  are  younger  critics  who  agree  with  him  in 
this  verdict  —  if  all  men  short  of  forty  may  be 
called  young  —  but  none  who  can  state  it  with  the 
same  serenity  and  detachment.  For,  like  all  men 
who  espouse  a  cause  and  marshal  all  their  forces  in 
the  struggle,  they  take  on  the  color  of  the  gladiator 
and  the  controversialist.  The  critics  of  to-day,  like 


8  J.E.    SPINGARN 

the  critics  of  the  age  of  Boileau  or  the  Romantic 
Movement,  feel  forced,  willy  nilly,  to  take  sides. 
The  new  age  and  the  new  literature  are  facts,  over 
whelming  facts,  and  everyone  appears  to  think  that 
he  must  be  for  them  or  against  them. 

In  the  first  place,  there  are  the  academic  pessi 
mists,  among  whom  the  best  known  are  Paul  Elmer 
More  and  Professor  Irving  Babbitt.  Under  the  lit 
erary  editorship  of  Mr.  More,  the  New  York 
Nation  continued  to  be  (what  it  had  been  for 
years)  the  organ  of  America's  best  scholarship,  and 
became,  in  addition,  the  high  citadel  of  critical  con 
servatism.  The  ten  or  more  volumes  of  his  u  Shel- 
burne  Essays,"  made  up  largely  of  his  Nation 
articles,  represent  the  high-water  mark  of  American 
reaction.  One  after  another  the  writers  of  the 
modern  world  are  (to  use  a  phrase  of  his  own) 
"  stretched  on  the  rack  of  a  harsh  ethical  theory." 
Professor  Babbitt's  interest  is  still  less  predomin 
antly  literary;  literature  or  criticism  as  an  art  seems 
scarcely  to  exist  for  him;  he  lives  in  a  world  of 
abstractions  in  which  poems  and  novels  serve  merely 
as  documents  in  the  history  of  culture.  The  books 
in  which  he  has  presented  this  reaction  in  systematic 
form,  "  The  New  Laokoon,"  the  "  Masters  of  Mod 
ern  French  Criticism,"  and  "  Rousseau  and  Roman 
ticism,"  seem  pathetic  illustrations  of  misused  power. 
For  these  men  have  the  learning  and  culture  of  the 
best  academic  critics  of  France;  but  what  avails  their 
petulant  erudition  if  it  serves  no  other  purpose  than 
to  whine  over  the  irrevocable  past  and  to  sneer  at 
the  aspirations  of  modern  men?  To  have  a  new 
and  original  theory  of  the  arts  is  for  them  "  to  part 


AMERICAN    CRITICISM    TO-DAY        9 

company  with  Plato  and  Aristotle,  and  prove  the 
Greeks  incompetent  in  matters  of  beauty " ! 
Romanticism  and  the  romantic  temperament  are 
their  special  aversions.  Why  do  these  men  harp  on 
this  subject  with  an  irritating  iteration?  Why  does 
the  parvenu  harp  incessantly  on  the  bad  manners  of 
those  about  him?  These  men  are  themselves 
Romanticists,  with  the  romantic  distaste  for  reality, 
the  romantic  yearning  for  an  imaginary  past;  they 
are  lashing  their  own  hated  weaknesses  when  they 
seem  to  be  lashing  the  world  about  them.  Here  are 
the  sad  stigmata  of  the  sterile  soul. 

In  the  second  place,  there  are  the  modernists. 
They  have  this  in  common,  that  they  believe  all  ear 
lier  American  literature,  except  Walt  Whitman  (and 
possibly  Emerson  and  Poe),  vieux  jeu  and  irretriev 
ably  bad.  They  also  seem  to  agree  that  there  are 
no  good  critics  in  America.  The  ground  for  these 
beliefs  is  that  there  has  been  too  much  mimicry  of 
Europe,  too  little  concentration  on  our  own  life  and 
art.  Most  of  them  (though  to  this  the  little  Lon 
don-born  circle  of  American  Imagists  is  an  excep 
tion)  seem  to  think  that  an  American  writer  should 
deal  only  with  American  life,  and  more  particularly 
with  contemporary  American  life.  In  this  they  are 
merely  reviving  some  of  the  oldest  illusions  of  crit 
icism  —  that  the  critic  can  determine  in  advance  the 
subjects  of  creative  artists,  that  some  subjects  are 
good  material  and  others  bad,  and  that  any  subject 
can  be  made  other  than  a  theme  of  contemporary 
life  by  the  living  poet.  One  who  served  in  the 
Great  War  may  say  without  misunderstanding  that 
patriotism  is  a  political  and  not  an  artistic  ideal. 


(10  J.E.SPINGARN 

But  what  may  be  without  foundation  for  any  rea 
soned  aesthetic  theory  may  for  the  historic  moment 
be  good  practical  advice.  An  older  America  did 
need  liberation  from  the  long  serfdom  to 
Europe  and  the  mere  parrot-like  acceptance  and 
reiteration  of  her  ideals  and  verdicts.  There  is  no 
real  disparity  between  the  demand  that  what  has 
been  crude  and  raucous  in  American  criticism  needs 
more  culture,  and  the  demand  that  American  crit 
icism  should  cease  to  be  derivative  and  mimetic;  for 
what  may  be  needed  after  all  is  one  of  the  finest 
products  of  culture,  a  true  and  original  independence 
of  judgment  and  taste. 

So  independence,  even  in  its  transitional  stage  of 
irritable  revolt,  deserved  a  welcome.  This  "  new 
freedom  "  has  been  furthered  by  many  journals,  by 
many  newspapers  and  reviews  —  Reedy' s  Mirror., 
the  Little  Review,  the  Dial,  the  various  poetry 
magazines,  Braithwaite's  annual  reviews  of  poetry 
in  the  Boston  Transcript  and  elsewhere,  the 
short-lived  Seven  Arts,  the  New  Republic  under 
Francis  Hackett  (himself  one  of  the  keenest  and 
most  delightful  of  our  reviewers),  and  the  liter 
ary  supplements  of  some  of  the  daily  newspapers, 
among  which  Llewellyn  Jones's  in  the  Chicago 
Evening  Post  has  in  this  respect  been  a  pioneer. 
The  general  average  of  American  reviewing  is  still 
deplorable,  as  the  author  of  any  new  book  learns 
only  too  soon;  but  we  have  at  least  reached  the 
stage,  thank  heaven,  where  every  book  worth  while 
is  sure  of  some  comment  that  goes  to  the  very  heart 
of  the  subject. 

Our  modernists,  then,  are  for  the  most  part  in- 


AMERICAN    CRITICISM    TO-DAY      II 

spirited  by  the  sense  of  change  and  controversy. 
They  have  the  American  feeling  that  things  can  be 
changed,  and  literature  as  easily  as  a  political  sys 
tem.  They  are  chiefly  concerned  with  problems  of 
practical  wisdom;  they  skim  lightly  over  the  deep 
sea  of  aesthetic  thought;  indeed,  they  all  suffer  from 
want  of  brooding  over  the  meaning  of  art.  Thus 
Van  Wyck  Brooks,  in  his  earlier  books,  preached  a 
Middle  Western  theory  of  the  new  freedom  (picture 
to  yourself  young  America  writing  Matthew 
Arnold's  theories  of  literature  as  a  "  criticism  of 
life  "  into  the  literary  platform  of  the  Progressive 
Party!);  and  something  of  the  same  extra-literary 
pre-occupation,  with  a  new  psychological  twist,  re 
appears  in  his  brilliant  and  remarkable  study  of 
Mark  Twain,  which  gives  Mr.  Brooks  a  place  of 
distinction  in  American  criticism.  The  most  raucous 
and  the  most  untameable  is  H.  L.  Mencken.  He 
uses  a  vernacular  which  Englishmen  will  recognize 
as  "  American,"  and  his  thought  has  some  of  the 
raciness  of  his  own  vernacular.  Read  his  book  on 
the  u  American  Language,"  a  veritable  encyclo 
paedia  of  native  idioms,  and  consider  its  challenge: 
American  speech  is  no  longer  to  be  regarded  as  sub 
ject  to  British  opinion,  or  even  as  a  joint  heritage  of 
the  English-speaking  world,  but  as  a  new  and  won 
derful  thing  whose  growth  is  to  be  entrusted  to  the 
central  authority  of  America  only,  to  remake  as 
French  or  Italian  remade  its  ancestral  Latin,  if  need 
be.  Or  read  his  "Prefaces"  and  "Prejudices," 
full  of  a  vitality  and  a  verve  that  make  one  forget 
lapses  of  taste  and  "smart  Aleck"  wit;  here  at 
least  is  none  of  that  thin  anaemic  hesitancy  that  has 


12  J.    E.    SPINGARN 

been  the  earmark  of  the  "  best  critics  "  of  America's 
past.  His  criticism  has  some  of  the  virtues  of  the 
surgeon's  knife.  He  is  undisciplined,  even  vulgar, 
but  keen  with  the  love  of  literature  and  fearless  of 
what  is  new  and  unapproved. 

Finally,  there  are  the  apologists  and  interpreters 
of  the  "  new  poetry,"  the  creators  of  a  theory  of  an 
"  American  Renaissance,"  including  among  many 
others  Amy  Lowell  and  Louis  Untermeyer,  he  with 
the  shrewdness  and  wit  of  Manhattan,  she  with  the 
self-assurance  of  Brahmin  New  England.  Mr. 
Untermeyer's  "  New  Era  in  American  Poetry  "  is 
intelligent,  sympathetic,  often  brilliant,  with  an  eye 
and  ear  for  every  new  singer,  however  uncertain  may 
be  his  voice.  It  interprets  the  surface  of  things 
with  a  remarkable  shrewdness;  but  as  a  reprint  of 
occasional  reviews  it  foregoes  the  effort  of  transmut 
ing  the  snap  judgments  of  journalism  into  the  con 
sidered  and  rounded  judgments  of  literature,  as  if 
the  kaleidoscope  were  the  fore-ordained  instrument 
of  criticism.  Miss  Lowell  has  a  "  theory  of 
poetry  " ;  it,  too,  is  concerned  with  the  surface  of 
things,  with  the  practical  problems  of  meter,  meta 
phor,  the  choice  of  words  and  subjects,  and  other 
matters  in  which  America  may  have  needed  her  keen 
admonition  and  instruction.  But  her  greatest  serv 
ice  to  criticism  has  been  in  interpreting  contemporary 
poets.  In  her  "  Six  French  Poets  "  and  her  "  Tend 
encies  of  Modern  American  Poetry  "  she  does  not 
dissipate  her  forces  over  the  whole  field,  but  with 
masculine  directness  and  energy  she  selects  her  sub 
jects  from  among  the  proved,  the  unproved,  and  the 
unapproved;  and  daring  ta  deal  with  the  latest  poet 


AMERICAN    CRITICISM    TO-DAY      13 

as  if  he  (or  sometimes  she)  were  a  classic,  compels 
attention  by  a  certain  naive  sincerity,  and  almost 
persuades  us  at  times  that  hillocks  are  mountains, 
and  geese,  swans. 

In  the  field  of  dramatic  criticism,  Ludwig  Lew- 
isohn  of  the  Nation  and  Francis  Hackett  of  the 
New  Republic  tower  above  their  fellows,  and 
seem  almost  the  harbingers  of  a  new  school.  With 
them  we  say  farewell  to  the  old  mumblejumble 
about  "  dramatic  technique,"  "  dramaturgic  skill," 
and  the  "  theory  of  the  theater,"  which  for  a  genera 
tion  has  served  our  critics  both  as  an  excuse  for  not 
thinking  and  as  a  ground  for  accepting  the  sorriest 
plays.  Here  at  least  are  a  new  spirit  and  a  new 
approach;  a  play  ceases  to  be  a  product  of  special 
machine-made  rules,  and  becomes  a  work  of  art,  to 
be  judged  by  the  standards  common  to  all  such 
works.  Mr.  Lewisohn  is  one  of  the  few  critics  in 
America  for  whom  learning  and  a  wide  culture  have 
served,  not  as  a  shackle,  but  as  a  ladder  and  a  liber 
ation. 

The  English  reader  of  this  roll-call  of  critics  may 
ask:  Have  any  of  these  critics  interpreted  a  single 
writer  with  the  touch  of  a  master,  or  added  a  single 
aesthetic  idea  to  the  sum  total  of  our  knowledge  of 
the  meaning  of  art?  Perhaps  the  English  reader 
may  find  an  answer  by  asking  the  same  question  con 
cerning  the  critics  of  his  own  country  to-day.  The 
Victorian  poet  who  said  that  "  good  critics  are  rarer 
than  good  authors  "  was  right.  To  feel  deeply  and 
yet  to  think  profoundly,  to  know  much  and  yet  to 
write  well  —  it  is  no  easy  staircase  that  the  great 
critic  has  to  climb. 


14  J  .    E.    SPINGARN 

It  may  be  too  much  to  ask  of  our  critics  that  they 
shall  have  a  rounded  aesthetic  theory,  though  the 
greatest  criticism  has  most  often  proceeded  from 
philosophical  minds.  It  may  be  too  much  to  ask  of 
our  critics  that  they  shall  be  creative  artists,  though 
the  greatest  modern  critics  have  conceived  of  their 
work  as  in  the  nature  of  an  aesthetic  creation.  It  may 
be  too  much  to  ask  of  our  critics  that  they  shall 
possess  a  rounded  scholarship,  though  the  greatest 
critics  have  possessed  a  wide  and  disciplined  culture. 
But  to  ask  that  the  moment's  mood  shall  give  way 
to  a  deeper  brooding  on  the  meaning  of  beauty,  that 
literature  be  regarded  with  discreet  reverence  as  an 
art  and  not  merely  as  a  document  in  the  history  of  a 
nation's  culture,  and,  above  all,  that  criticism  con 
ceive  of  itself  as  sharing  somewhat  in  the  art  which 
it  interprets,  and  speak  with  an  independence  of 
judgment  and  taste  worthy  of  its  meaning  and  pur 
pose  —  this  is  not  too  much  to  ask,  or  to  hope 
from,  the  new  America. 

J.  E.  SPINGARN. 


Recent  American  Poetry 

THERE  was  a  boy  in  Springfield,  Illinois,  who  refused 
to  grow  up.  Others  started  on  their  career  of  be 
ing  railways  presidents  and  bank  presidents  and 
corporation  lawyers,  but  he  refused  to  take  on  a 
status.  Moreover,  he  demanded  things  such  as 
boys  in  other  countries  are  free  of  —  a  folk-lore  and 
a  romance  of  chivalry.  He  would  not  have  these 
as  transplanted  things;  he  wanted  them  to  be  as 
close  to  him  as  the  electric  sign  and  the  movie  hall. 
They  were  not  given  him,  and  so  he  began  to  create 
them.  The  stars  of  the  film,  Mary  Pickford  and 
Mae  Marsh,  became  his  Dulcineas  and  his  Unas. 
And  he  turned  to  the  people  whose  speech  and  ges 
ture  had  the  most  flavor  of  folk-life  —  the  negroes 

—  and  out  of   their  story  and   their   extravagant 
music  he  made  poems  that  have  the  quality  of  myth 
and  folk-lore. 

The  boy  in  Springfield  was  Vachel  Lindsay.     His 
great  discovery  was  the  four-time  measure  in  poetry 

—  the  measure  related  to  rag-time  and  the  negro 
Jazz  music.     Gilbert  Chesterton  has  used  it  to  pro 
duce  a  staccato  effect  in  his  ballad  "  Lepanto  " — 

Strong  gongs  groaning  as  the  guns  boom  far, 
Don  John  of  Austria  is  going  to  the  war, 
Stiff  flags  straining  in  the  night-blasts  cold, 
In  the  gloom  black-purple,  in  the  glint  old-gold, 
15 


l6  PADRAIC    COLUM 

It  was  just  the  measure  for  a  new  troubadour  to  take 
hold  of  —  a  troubadour  of  the  roads  streaming  with 
automobiles. 

All  Vachel  Lindsay's  effort  is  to  make  a  heritage 
of  romance  for  America.  And  it  is  not  the  rootless 
romance  of  a  Longfellow  he  would  embody,  but  a 
romance  that  will  not  be  aloof  from  the  picture- 
house  and  the  universal  automobile.  He  himself  is 
the  troubadour  of  his  romance,  reciting  his  poems 
publicly  according  to  a  highly-suggestive  method  he 
has  worked  out.  He  would,  he  has  told  us,  appeal 
to  the  higher  vaudeville  imagination.  But  what  he 
brings  to  that  imagination  is  something  profoundly 
serious  and  profoundly  ethical.  He  has  made  for 
America  a  romance  with  most  unexpected  colors  — 
the  blackness  of  the  Congo  in  his  great  negro  poem; 
the  silks  and  brocades  of  China  in  his  poem  about  the 
Chinese  laundry;  the  red  of  fire  that  is  in  his  "  Fire 
man's  Ball,"  and  the  glow  of  the  West  that  is  in  his 
"  Santa  Fe  Trail."  It  is  difficult  to  quote  from 
Lindsay's  characteristic  poems,  for  they  have  the 
expositions  and  the  climaxes  and  the  stresses  of  a 
drama,  and  in  addition  they  are  not  free  from  stage 
directions.  However,  I  venture  to  quote  a  passage 
from  "  The  Santa  Fe  Trail."— 

This  is  the  order  of  the  music  of  the  morning:  — 
First,  from  the  far  East  comes  but  a  crooning; 
The  crooning  turns  to  a  sunrise  singing. 
Hark  to  the  calm-horn,  balm-horn,  psalm-horn; 
Hark  to  the  faint-horn,  quaint-horn,  saint-horn.  .  .  . 

Hark  to  the  pace-horn,  chase-horn,  race-horn! 
And  the  holy  veil  of  the  dawn  has  gone, 


RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY      17 

Swiftly  the  brazen  car  comes  on. 

It  burns  in  the  East  as  the  sunrise  burns, 

I  see  great  flashes  where  the  far  trail  turns. 

Its  eyes  are  lamps  like  the  eyes  of  dragons. 

It  drinks  gasoline  from  big  red  flagons. 

Butting  through  the  delicate  mists  of  the  morning, 

It  comes  like  lightning,  goes  past  roaring. 

It  will  hail  all  the  wind-mills,  taunting,  ringing, 

Dodge  the  cyclones, 

Count  the  milestones, 

On  through  the  ranges  the  prairie-dog  tills, 

Scooting  past  the  cattle  on  the  thousand  hills.  .  .  . 

Ho  for  the  tear-horn,  scare-horn,  dare-horn, 

Ho  for  the  gay-horn,  bark-horn,  bay-horn. 

Ho  for  Kansas,  land  that  restores  us 

When  houses  choke  us,  and  great  books  bore  us ! 

Sunrise  Kansas,  harvester's  Kansas, 

A  million  men  have  found  you  before  us. 

Far  away  the  Rachel- Jane, 

Not  defeated  by  the  horns, 

Sings  amid  a  hedge  of  thorns: 

"  Love  and  life, 

Eternal  youth  — 

Sweet,  sweet,  sweet,  sweet! 

Dew  and  glory, 

Love  and  truth, 

Sweet,  sweet,  sweet,  sweet!" 

It  was  in  1913  that  Vachel  Lindsay  published 
"  General  Booth  Enters  Heaven,"  the  first  of  his 
poems  that  had  the  appeal  to  the  higher  vaudeville 
imagination.  That  was  a  few  months  after  the 
foundation  of  the  Magazine  he  was  published  in  — 
Poetry,  a  Magazine  of  Ferse,  founded  by  Miss 


>l8  PADRAIC    COLUM 

Harriet  Monroe  —  herself  an  excellent  poet  —  with 
the  help  of  some  of  the  business  men  of  Chicago. 
In  the  following  year  Poetry  began  to  publish  note 
worthy  contributions  from  another  Illinois  man, 
Edgar  Lee  Masters.  Mr.  Masters  was  not  a  youth 
like  Vachel  Lindsay;  he  was  an  established  Chicago 
lawyer,  who,  rumor  had  it,  was  about  to  be  raised  to 
the  bench  when  his  friend  William  Jennings  Bryan 
discovered  that  he  had  unorthodox  ideas  about  the 
Deity.  His  contributions  to  Poetry  with  others 
added  appeared  with  the  plain  and  irreplacable  title 
"  Spoon  River  Anthology." 

It  is  a  book  made  up  of  readings  from  tombstones 
of  an  Illinois  village  churchyard.  Not  epitaphs  as 
they  were,  but  as  they  should  have  been  written. 
Did  Mr.  Masters  owe  his  idea  to  a  story  of  Mau 
passant's?  It  mattered  not,  for  he  had  made  the 
idea  his  own  by  the  force  with  which  he  possessed 
and  expressed  it.  The  result  is  a  book  which  has 
done  much  to  carry  American  poetry  away  from  the 
Academic,  from  the  Colonial  tradition. 

Critics  might  point  out  that  when  the  "  Spoon 
River  Anthology  "  was  praised  as  poetry  some  odd 
commitments  were  made.  Obviously  the  form  he 
used  —  the  short  unrhymed  monologue  —  gave  Mr. 
Masters  little  trouble  after  he  had  written  the  first 
score  of  pieces;  there  could  have  been  little  of  the 
conquest  of  his  material  which  every  poet  imposes 
upon  himself.  One  could  reply  that  the  poet  was 
shown  in  the  background  created  —  a  background 
of  tragic  defeat  against  which  were  placed  individ 
uals  absorbed  in  the  comedy  they  were  playing. 
Mr.  Masters  showed  himself  a  poet  when  he  con- 


RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY      19 

templated  the  whole  of  the  Spoon  River  community, 
and  a  satirist  when  he  wrote  of  particular  life  in  it. 

"  The  Spoon  River  Anthology  "  is  really  a  terrific 
satire  on  American  life  —  on  the  predatory-Puritan 
American  life.  Its  fortune  is  unaccountable.  For 
Americans  dislike  satire  as  the  boy  or  girl  dislikes 
it;  as  those  committed  to  an  optimistic  philosophy 
dislike  it.  And  yet  here  is  a  satire  that  attains  to 
the  circulation  of  a  best  seller.  Satire,  of  course, 
is  not  always  mockery;  satire  can  be  grave  and 
come  out  of  a  pitiful  heart,  and  Mr.  Masters'  satire 
had  the  quality  of  being  grave  and  pitiful. 

He  has  published  many  volumes  since  "  The 
Spoon  River  Anthology  " — "  Songs  and  Satires,'7 
"Towards  The  Gulf,"  "  The  Great  Valley."1 
Many  of  the  important  poems  in  these  volumes  cele 
brate  the  history,  the  landscape,  the  personages  of 
"The  Great  Valley "—  the  Valley  of  the  Miss 
issippi.  Edgar  Lee  Masters  is  prodigal  in  his 
poetry  —  satires  and  hymns  to  the  flesh  and  studies 
in  personality  make  up  a  great  bulk  of  his  work. 
For  him  Browning's  method  is  still  to  the  good,  and 
a  great  deal  of  his  poetry  is  in  the  form  of  dramatic 
monologues.  He  has  indicted  men  and  women,  but 
observe  how  manfully  he  can  praise  a  man  by  that 
memorable  poem  of  his  u  Simon  surnamed  Peter," 
— "  You  were  called  by  Him,  Peter,  a  rock,  but  we 
give  you  the  name  of  Peter  the  Flame."  As  an 
example  of  Mr.  Masters'  work  when  it  is  at  once 
simple  and  intense,  I  quote  one  of  the  epitaphs  of 
"  The  Spoon  River  Anthology." 

1  Since  this  was  written  Mr.  Masters  has  published  what  is  per 
haps  his  most  revealing  book — "Starved  Rock." 


20  PADRAICCOLUM 

ANNE  RUTLEDGE 

Out  of  me  unworthy  and  unknown 

The  vibrations  of  deathless  music; 

"  With  malice  toward  none,  with  charity  for  all." 

Out  of  me   the   forgiveness   of  millions   towards  millions, 

And  the  beneficent  face  of  a  nation 

Shining  with  justice  and  truth. 

I  am  Anne  Rutledge  who  sleep  beneath  these  weeds, 

Beloved  in  life  of  Abraham  Lincoln, 

Wedded  to  him,  not  through  union, 

But  through  separation. 

Bloom  forever,  O  Republic, 

From  the  dust  of  my  bosom. 

Abraham  Lincoln !  He  is  the  figure  that  the  poets 
of  The  Great  Valley  —  Masters,  Lindsay,  Sandburg 
—  look  to  as  the  shining  hero.  If  we  put  beside  the 
above  a  poem  out  of  Carl  Sandburg's  "  Corn  Husk- 
ers  "  we  get  a  significant  difference  between  Edgar 
Lee  Masters  and  a  Chicago  poet  who  has  followed 
him  in  publication.  Here  is  Sandburg's :  — 

FIRE  LOGS 

Nancy  Hanks  dreams  by  the  fire ; 
Dreams,  and  the  logs  sputter, 
And  the  yellow  tongues  climb. 
Red  lines  lick  their  way  in  flickers. 
Oh,  sputter,  logs. 

Oh,  dream,  Nancy. 
Time  now  for  a  beautiful  child. 
Time  now  for  a  tall  man  to  come. 

Masters  takes  life  at  the  end,  and  the  younger  Sand 
burg  takes  it  at  the  beginning. 

There  is  a  wonderful  sense  of  beginnings  in  Carl 


RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY      21 

Sandburg's  poems.  His  first  book  was  called  "  Chi 
cago  Poems,"  and  he  writes  again  and  again  about 
noises  and  crowds.  But  he  is  essentially  a  poet  of 
spaces  and  silences.  His  poems  give  us  the  prairie 
landscape  under  its  everlasting  aspects  of  spring  and 
winter,  summer  and  fall.  And  the  memory  of  the 
Indian  dominates  his  prairie  and  his  prairie-cities. 
Sandburg  has  not  Whitman's  great  rhythm,  but  he 
has  something  of  the  freshness  and  the  abundance  of 
Whitman's  great  vocabulary.  And  there  is  a  kin 
ship  with  earth  and  sky  and  water  in  all  he  writes. 
Here  is  a  poem  from  his  second  and  latest  book 
"  Corn  Huskers  " :  — 

VALLEY  SONG 

Your  eyes  and  the  valley  are  memories. 

Your  eyes  fire  and  the  valley  a  bowl. 

It  was  here  a  moonrise  crept  over  the  timberline. 

It  was  here  we  turned  the  coffee  cups  upside  down. 

And  your  eyes  and  the  moon  swept  the  valley. 

I  will  see  you  again  to-morrow. 

I  will  see  you  again  in  a  million  years. 

I  will  never  know  your  dark  eyes  again. 

These  are  three  ghosts  I  keep. 

These  are  three  sumach-red  dogs  I  run  with'. 

All  of  it  wraps  and  knots  to  a  riddle: 
I  have  the  moon,  the  timberline,  and  you. 
All  three  are  gone  —  and  I  keep  all  three. 

So  much  for  the  poets  of  the  Great  Valley.  The 
poets  of  New  England  have  their  own  distinctive- 
ness.  They  have  not,  however,  the  same  clear  his 
toric  beginning,  nor  that  relation  of  publication 


22  PADRAICCOLUM 

which  would  let  us  put  them  in  an  historical  order. 
Edwin  Arlington  Robinson,  for  instance,  was  pub 
lishing  before  there  was  a  definitely  American  move 
ment  in  poetry.  His  verse  which  marks  no  innova 
tion  is  very  different  from  the  verse  of  the  Middle- 
Western  poets;  his  outlook  is  more  sophisticated. 
But  his  people  belong  to  a  definite  American  milieu. 

Some  writers  are  born  with  a  feeling  for  local 
life,  some  achieve  that  feeling,  and  some  everlast 
ingly  thrust  it  upon  themselves.  Edwin  Arlington 
Robinson  belongs  to  the  first  company  —  at  all 
events  he  parades  no  discovery  of  locality.  In 
America  too  there  are  decaying  cities,  and  Robin 
son's  books  "  Captain  Craig,"  "  The  Town  by  the 
River,"  "  The  Man  Against  the  Sky  "  give  us  the 
men  and  women  of  such  places. 

Edwin  Arlington  Robinson  is  the  poet  of  enig 
matic  character.  He  is  too,  the  poet  of  suspended 
drama.  All  his  people  are  characters  in  a  drama  of 
which  the  climax  or  the  anti-climax  has  not  been 
reached.  Have  they  passed  the  worst,  or  do  they 
face  their  worst?  They  do  not  know,  and  we  are 
not  permitted  to  guess.  Meanwhile  they  show  a 
defeated  life  —  but  yet  a  life  that  knowing  itself 
defeated  wins  to  a  liberation  which  makes  it  a  little 
free  and  a  little  triumphant.  "  We  have  each  a 
darkening  hill  to  climb,"  "  I'll  soon  be  changing  as 
all  do  to  something  I  have  always  been,"  "  The 
lonely  changelessness  of  dying."  These  are  phrases 
that  show  Mr.  Robinson's  reading  of  life.  He  can 
write  to  a  brave  music,  but  he  uses  traditional  verse- 
forms,  often,  I  think,  to  mark  a  mockery.  If  I  were 
asked  to  give  his  characteristic  poem  I  should  quote 


RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY      23 

"  The  Poor  Relation  "  from  "  The  Man  Against  the 
Sky."  These  are  the  last  three  of  the  nine  stanzas 
of  the  poem. — 

None  live  who  need  fear  anything 

From   her,   whose  losses  are  their  pleasure; 

The  plover  with  a  wounded  wing 

Stays  not  the  flight  that  others  measure; 

So  there  she  waits,  and  while  she  lives, 

And  death  forgets,  and  faith  forgives, 

Her  memories  go  foraging 

For  bits  of  childhood  song  they  treasure. 

And  like  a  giant  harp  that  hums 
On  always,  and  is  always  blending 
The  coming  of  what  never  comes 
With  what  is  past  and  has  an  ending, 
The  city  trembles,  throbs,  and  pounds 
Outside,  and  through  a  thousand  sounds 
The  small  intolerable  drums 
Of  Time  are  like  slow  drops  descending. 

Bereft  enough  to  shame  a  sage 

And  given  little  to  long  sighing, 

With  no  illusion  to  assuage 

The  lonely  changelessness  of  dying, — 

Unsought,  unthought-of,  and  unheardj 

She  sings  and  watches  like  a  bird, 

Safe  in  a  comfortable  cage 

From  which  there  will  be  no  more  flying. 

If  there  is  in  America  one  poet  more  than  another 
whose  name  is  a  challenge,  that  poet  is  Miss  Amy 
Lowell.  She  is  the  propagandist  of  innovation. 
She  is  besides  a  most  abundant  writer,  and  again  and 
again  she  makes  in  unrhymed  and  freely-rhythmed 
verse  poems  that  are  undeniably  beautiful. 


24  PADRAICCOLUM 

She  has  had  her  failures,  of  course.  But  with 
her  abundance  she  can  afford  to  efface  them.  Not 
only  is  she  a  poet  of  distinction,  but  she  is  a  liber 
ating  influence  on  American  poetry.  The  new  forms 
for  which  she  stands  are  likely  to  further  the  produc 
tion  of  a  distinctive  poetic  literature  for  America. 
These  new  forms  are  words  in  a  new  declaration  of 
independence.  For  the  American  poet  of  the  future 
may  be  the  child  of  a  Syrian,  a  Greek,  a  Swede  or  a 
Russian.  The  traditional  rhythm  of  English  verse 
may  not  be  in  his  blood,  and  he  may  fumble  in  his 
poetry  if  he  wishes  to  use  it.  But  Miss  Lowell 
helps  to  fling  into  currency  a  verse  rhythm  that  he 
can  mould  as  he  pleases.  And  as  he  uses  it  he  will 
not  be  embarrassed  by  memories  of  forgotten  dances 
and  disused  harp-strings  that  are  in  the  traditional 
poetic  measures  of  the  British  Islands. 

Miss  Lowell  is  above  everything  else  a  teller  of 
stories  —  or  rather  a  teller  of  stories  that  are  at 
tached  to  stories.  She  has  an  extraordinary  love 
—  a  child's  love  fortunately  retained  —  for  things  as 
things;  windmills  and  balloons,  jewels  and  violins 
seen  as  things,  pieces  of  furniture  in  an  old  attic. 
She  has  named  one  of  her  books  u  Men,  Women 
and  Ghosts,"  but  I  think  a  fitter  title  would  have 
been  u  Men,  Women  and  Things." 

She  considers  —  not  always,  happily  —  that  her 
story  is  bound  to  an  action.  Now  action  with  Amy 
Lowell  is  certainly  a  way  of  spoiling  something.  It 
cuts  across  her  imaginative  array  of  things.  In  one 
of  her  poems  "  The  Red  Lacquer  Music  Stand  "  she 
shows  us  a  delightful  collection  of  things  in  an  old 
attic.  But  then  there  comes  along  a  boy  who  wants 


RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY      25 

to  burn  a  sacrifice  on  one  of  the  pieces  and  our 
whole  delighted  contemplation  is  broken  short. 

I  have  written  about  her  stories  and  about  her 
poems  about  things.  But  in  Miss  Lowell's  volumes 
are  to  be  found  three  or  four  poems  of  personal 
desire  that  are  as  intense  as  anything  in  American 
poetry.  One  of  these  is  "  Patterns."  Here  the 
story,  the  character,  the  things  seen,  all  pass  into  one 
thing  —  a  throb  of  the  heart.  I  want  to  quote  this 
poem,  but  it  is  not  possible  to  quote  all  of  it. — 

PATTERNS 

I  walk  down  the  garden  paths, 

And  all  the  daffodils 

Are  blowing,  and  the  bright  blue  squills. 

I  walk  down  the  patterned  garden-paths 

In  my  stiff,  brocaded  gown. 

With  my  powdered  hair  and  jewelled  fan, 

I  too  am  a  rare 

Pattern.     As  I  wander  down 

The  garden  paths. 

My  dress  is  richly  figured, 

And  the  train 

Makes  a  pink  and  silver  stain 

On  the  gravel,  and  the  thrift 

Of  the  borders. 

Just  a  plate  of  current  fashion, 

Tripping  by  in  high-heeled,  ribboned  shoes. 

Not  a  softness  anywhere  about  me, 

Only  whalebone  and  brocade. 

And  I  sink  on  a  seat  in  the  shade 

Of  a  lime  tree.     For  my  passion 

Wars  against  the  stiff  brocade. 

The  daffodils  and  squills 


26  PADRAICCOLUM 

Flutter  in  the  breeze 

As  they  please. 

And  I  weep; 

For  the  lime-tree  is  in  blossom 

And  one  small  flower  has  dropped  upon  my  bosom. 

Underneath  the  fallen  blossom 

In  my  bosom. 

Is  a  letter  I  have  hid. 

It  was  brought  to  me  this  morning  by  a  rider  from  the  Duke. 

"Madame,  we  regret  to  inform  you  that  Lord  Hartwell 

Died  in  action  Thursday  se'nnight." 

As  I  read  it  in  the  white,  morning  sunlight, 

The  letters  squirmed  like  snakes. 

•          •••••••• 

In  Summer  and  in  Winter  I  shall  walk 

Up  and  down 

The  patterned  garden-paths 

In  my  stiff,  brocaded  gown. 

The  squills  and  daffodils 

Will  give  place  to  pillared  roses,  and  to  asters,  and  to  snow. 

1  shall  go 

Up  and  down, 

In  my  gown. 

Gorgeously  arrayed, 

Boned  and  stayed. 

And  the  softness  of  my  body  will  be  guarded  from  embrace 

By  each  button,  hook,  and  lace. 

For  the  man  who  should  loose  me  is  dead, 

Fighting  with  the  Duke  in  Flanders, 

In  a  pattern  called  war. 

Christ!     What  are  patterns  for? 

The  poet  most  obviously  of  New  England  is 
Robert  Frost.  I  remember  Robert  Frost's  once  tell 
ing  me  that  his  poems  owed  something  of  their  incep- 


RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY      27 

tion  to  Virgil  —  to  the  "  Georgics,"  I  imagine.  It 
would  be  curious  to  trace  the  likeness  between 
these  poems  in  which  conversations  are  interrupted 
by  telephone  calls  and  the  idyls  of  Virgil's  husband 
men.  And  yet  a  kinship  exists  in  the  reality  of 
scenes  and  people  that  are  in  both. 

What  is  it  that  makes  Robert  Frost's  people  like 
Wordsworth's  or  Burns'  people  and  unlike  Crabbe's 
or  Goldsmith's  people?  In  the  poetry  of  the  eigh 
teenth  century  we  walk  down  a  laneway  and  cross  a 
field  and  come  to  a  place  that  we  judge  at  once,  say 
ing,  "  It  is  horrible  that  they  had  to  put  up  that 
workhouse,  or  that  they  had  to  level  the  cottage." 
And  then  we  hear  a  story  that  is  exciting  and  im 
pressive,  and  the  person  or  people  that  the  story  is 
told  about  become  familiar  to  us  —  as  familiar  as  a 
brother,  or  a  schoolmate,  or  a  teacher.  But  Words 
worth's  or  Burns'  people  can  never  be  familiar  to  us 
in  that  way.  They  can  be  no  more  familiar  to  us 
than  we  can  be  familiar  to  ourselves.  And  Robert 
Frost's  people,  with  the  scene  they  move  in,  have  the 
same  sort  of  inaccessible  life. 

His  fields  with  their  stone-fences,  his  pastures  with 
their  apple  trees,  his  frame  houses,  have  a  character 
of  their  own.  And  he  can  give  character  to  inani 
mate  things  —  to  an  unlived-in  cottage,  to  the 
neglected  wood-pile  that  warms  "  the  frozen  swamp 
.  .  .  with  the  slow,  smokeless  burning  of  decay." 
A  wall  has  some  undiscovered  enemy,  as  we  know 
when  we  read  one  of  his  poems;  and  as  he  plods  and 
labors  after  the  explanation,  we  get  some  hint  of  an 
earthly  mystery.  Robert  Frost  has  made  no  obvi 
ous  innovation  in  verse-technique.  He  has  made  a 


28  PADRAICCOLUM 

certain  featureless  blank-verse  his  own;  using  this 
verse,  his  men  and  women  who  obviously  have  little 
eloquence,  can  reach  to  a  speech  that  has  beauty  and 
tragic  power.  I  should  like  to  quote  from  his  dram 
atic  idyls  "  The  Death  of  the  Hired  Man,"  "  A 
Servant  to  Servants,"  "  The  Self-seeker,"  in  "  North 
of  Boston";  and  "The  Home  Stretch,"  and 
"  Snow  "  in  "  Mountain  Interval,"  but  isolated  pas 
sages  do  not  show  the  power  that  is  in  these  poems. 
Instead  I  shall  quote  one  of  the  short  poems,  not  in 
blank-verse,  from  Mr.  Frost's  latest  book,  "  Moun 
tain  Interval." — 

THE  GUM  GATHERER 

There  overtook  me  and  drew  me  in 

To  his  down-hill,  early  morning  stride, 

And  set  me  five  miles  on  my  road 

Better  than  if  he  had  had  me  ride, 

A  man  with  a  swinging  bag  for  load 

And  half  the  bag  wound  round  his  hand. 

We  talked  like  barking  above  the  din 

Of  water  we  walked  along  beside. 

And  for  my  telling  him  where  I'd  been 

And  where  I  lived  in  mountain  land 

To  be  coming  home  the  way  I  was, 

He  told  me  a  little  about  himself. 

He  came  from  higher  up  in  the  pass 

Where  the  grist  of  the  new-beginning  brooks 

In  blocks  split  off  the  mountain  mass  — 

And  hopeless  grist  enough  it  looks 

Ever  to  grind  to  soil  for  grass. 

(The  way  it  is  will  do  for  moss). 

There  he  had  built  his  stolen  shack. 

It  had  to  be  a  stolen  shack 

Because  of  the  fears  of  fire  and  loss 


RECENT    AMERICAN    POETRY      29 

That  trouble  the  sleep  of  lumber  folk: 
Visions  of  half  the  world  turned  black 
And  the  sun  shrunken  yellow  in  smoke. 
We  know  who  when  they  come  to  town 
Bring  berries  under  the  wagon  seat, 
Or  a  basket  of  eggs  between  their  feet; 
What  this  man  brought  in  a  cotton  sack 
Was  gum,  the  gum  of  the  mountain  spruce. 
He  showed  me  lumps  of  the  scented  stuff 
Like  uncut  jewels,  dull  and  rough. 
It  comes  to  market  golden  brown; 
But  turns  to  pink  beneath  the  teeth. 

I  told  him  this  is  a  pleasant  life 
To  set  your  breast  to  the  bark  of  trees 
Th'at  all  your  days  are  dim  beneath, 
And  reaching  up  with  a  little  knife, 
To  loose  the  resin  and  take  it  down. 
And  bring  it  to  market  when  you  please. 

America  to-day  is  lucky  enough  to  have  in  these  a 
company  of  poets  whose  names  sound  a  challenge. 
There  are  other  names,  of  course,  and  they  are  by 
no  means  secondary.  But  the  poets  named  here  — 
Robert  Frost,  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Carl  Sandburg, 
Vachel  Lindsay,  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson  are  the 
ones  whose  banners  wave  over  the  field. 

Is  any  one  of  them  the  heir  of  Whitman?  No. 
Whitman's  heir  has  not  yet  been  born.  The  poets 
named  have  an  idiom  of  their  own  —  an  idiom  that 
in  no  way  comes  near  Whitman's.  They  have  a 
power  which  comes  out  of  a  discovery  which  is 
marked  in  English  and  in  Irish  poetry  —  the  discov 
ery  of  local  life,  and  that  which  made  John  Mase- 
field  and  J.  M.  Synge  has  made  too  Edgar  Lee  Mas- 


30  PADRAICCOLUM 

ters,  Carl  Sandburg,  Vachel  Lindsay  and  Robert 
Frost.  These  poets,  with  Amy  Lowell  and  Edwin 
Arlington  Robinson,  have  lifted  American  poetry 
away  from  the  academic,  which  in  America  is  always 
the  Colonial.  America  may  have  to  wait  as  long  for 
the  heir  of  Whitman  as  England  had  to  wait  for  the 
heir  of  Chaucer,  and  there  may  be  as  much  of 
growth  and  change  between.  That  change  and 
growth  must  eventuate  in  the  emergence  of  America 
as  a  full  nationality.  Her  nationality  has  been  a 
political  one,  but  it  is  now  becoming  an  intellectual 
one  and  the  poets  of  to-day  are  the  signs  of,  and  the 
help  to  a  full  nationality. 

PADRAIC  COLUM. 


The  Literary  Capital  of  the  United  States 

HOWEVER  largely  New  York  may  bulk  in  the  imag 
ination  of  Europe  or  in  the  sight  of  those  Americans 
who  hang  upon  the  front  and  rear  edges  of  the 
materialistic  conception  of  history,  it  ceased  long  ago 
to  hold  any  leadership  in  that  department  of  the 
national  life  of  the  republic  which  has  to  do  with 
beautiful  letters,  or  even  to  bear  a  part  of  any  solid 
consequence  therein.  There  is  no  longer  a  New 
York  school  of  writers,  as  there  was  in  Irving's  day, 
and  in  Poe's,  and  even  in  Whitman's  and  Mark 
Twain's;  there  are,  indeed,  not  more  than  two  or 
three  New  York  writers  in  practice  to-day  who  are 
worthy  of  serious  consideration  at  all.  Scarcely  a 
book  of  capital  importance  to  the  national  literature 
has  come  out  of  the  town  for  a  generation.  Nearly 
every  work  of  genuine  and  arresting  originality  pub 
lished  in  the  United  States  during  that  time,  nearly 
every  work  authentically  representative  of  the  life 
and  thought  of  the  American  people,  from  George 
Ade's  "  Fables  in  Slang,"  to  Edgar  Lee  Masters's 
"  The  Spoon  River  Anthology,'  and  from  Frank 
Norris's  "  McTeague  "  to  Theodore  Dreiser's  "  Sis 
ter  Carrie,"  has  been  put  together  in  the  hinterland 
and  by  a  writer  innocent  of  metropolitan  influence. 

The  phenomenon,  so  far  as  I  know,  is  unique.     It 
is  impossible  to  imagine  saying  that  of  London,  or  of 

31 


32  H.    L.    MENCKEN 

Paris,  or  of  Berlin,  or  even  of  such  somnolent  and 
second-rate  capitals  as  Christiania  and  Berne.  But 
New  York  itself  is  unique.  Alone  among  the  great 
cities  of  the  world  it  has  no  definite  intellectual  life, 
no  body  of  special  ideals  and  opinions,  no  aristo 
cratic  attitudes.  Even  the  common  marks  of  nation 
ality  are  few  and  faint;  one  half  wonders,  observing 
its  prodigious  crowds  and  noting  their  lethargic  re 
actions,  if  it  is  actually  American  at  all.  Huge, 
Philistine,  self-centered,  ignorant  and  vulgar,  it  is 
simply  a  sort  of  free  port,  a  Hansa  town,  a  place 
where  the  raw  materials  of  civilization  are  received, 
sorted,  baled,  and  reshipped.  In  all  the  fine  arts  it 
is  a  mere  wholesaler,  and  vastly  less  the  connoisseur 
than  the  auctioneer.  It  has  in  Central  Park  the 
western  world's  largest  storehouse  of  artistic  fossils 
and  mummies,  real  and  fraudulent,  good  and  bad  — 
and  yet  it  seldom,  if  ever,  produces  a  picture  worth 
looking  at.  Its  peculiarly  obnoxious  social  pushers, 
Christian  and  Jew,  pour  out  millions  for  music  every 
year  —  and  yet  even  Philadelphia  has  a  better 
orchestra.  It  prints  four-fifths  of  the  books  of  the 
nation  and  nine-tenths  of  its  magazines  —  and  yet 
the  salient  men  among  its  native  authors  are  Robert 
W.  Chambers,  Owen  Johnson,  and  James  Mont 
gomery  Flagg. 

Life  buzzes  and  coruscates  on  Manhattan  Island, 
but  the  play  of  ideals  is  not  there.  The  New  York 
spirit,  for  all  the  gaudy  pretentiousness  of  the  town, 
is  a  spirit  of  timidity,  of  regularity,  of  safe  medio 
crity.  The  typical  New  Yorker,  whether  artist  or 
mere  trader,  feels  the  heavy  hand  of  the  capitalistic 
bourgeoisie  upon  him  at  all  times.  He  is  always 


THE    LITERARY    CAPITAL  33 

looking  over  his  shoulder  furtively,  in  fear  that  he 
may  have  done  something  that  is  not  approved,  and 
so  brought  down  upon  himself  some  inexplicable 
penalty.  Here  are  the  great  rewards,  but  here  also 
are  the  inviolable  taboos.  The  individual,  facing 
that  relentless  regimentation,  is  afraid  to  be  himself. 
Above  all,  he  is  afraid  to  be  an  American.  The 
town  is  shoddily  cosmopolitan,  second-rate  Euro 
pean,  extraordinarily  cringing,  a  sort  of  international 
Jenkins. 

The  artist  arriving  from  the  provinces  is  con 
fronted  at  once  by  that  alarmed  orderliness,  that 
fear  of  ideas.  If  he  is  still  young  and  full  of  gas 
and  able  to  take  a  chance,  he  commonly  throws  him 
self  gallantly  into  Greenwich  Village,  the  tawdry 
Latin  Quarter  of  the  town  —  only  to  find  presently 
that  Greenwich  Village  has  been  regimented  too, 
that  its  revolts  are  artificial,  and  empty,  that  commer 
cial  Jews  behind  the  door  pull  its  wires.  But  if,  as 
is  more  likely,  he  comes  in  with  a  bit  of  sound  work 
behind  him,  and  is  eager  to  get  firm  earth  under  him, 
then  his  descent  follows  more  swiftly.  A  subtle 
something  wars  upon  the  elements  that  make  him 
what  he  is.  His  ideas  are  delicately  flattened  out. 
He  learns  to  do  things  as  they  should  be  done.  New 
York  swarms  with  such  wrecks  of  talents  —  men 
who  arrived  with  one  or  two  promising  books  behind 
them,  and  are  now  highly  respectable  inmates  of 
publishers'  bordellos. 

But  the  United  States,  for  all  that,  occasionally 
produces  a  good  book.  Now  and  then  it  even  pene 
trates  to  Europe  —  Dreiser's  "  Sister  Carrie,"  the 
Masters'  "  Anthology,"  London's  "  The  Call  of  the 


34  H.L.MENCKEN 

Wild."  More  often  it  is  hauled  up  by  the  Atlantic 
—  Willa  Gather's  "  My  Antonia,"  Sherwood  Ander 
son's  "  Winesburg,  Ohio,"  Carl  Sandburg's  "  Chi 
cago  Poems,"  Cabell's  "  The  Cream  of  the  Jest." 
Where  do  they  come  from?  Not  from  New  York: 
it  produces  nothing,  as  we  have  seen.  Not  from  Bos 
ton:  it  is  as  tragically  dead  as  Alexandria  or  Padua. 
Not  from  Philadelphia:  it  is  an  intellectual  slum. 
Not  from  San  Francisco:  its  old  life  and  color  are 
gone,  and  the  Methodists,  Baptists  and  other  such 
vermin  of  God  now  dominate  it.  Not  from  Wash 
ington,  or  St.  Louis,  or  New  Orleans,  or  Baltimore  : 
they  are  simply  flabby  and  degraded  villages.  Nay, 
from  none  of  these,  but  from  Chicago !  —  Chicago 
the  unspeakable  and  incomparable,  at  once  the  most 
hospitably  cosmopolitan  and  the  most  thoroughly 
American  of  American  cities :  — 

"  Hog  Butcher  for  the  World, 
Tool  Maker,  Stacker  of  Wheat, 
Player  with  Railroads,  and  the  Nation's  Freight  Handler;  " 

"  Laughing  the  stormy,  husky,  brawling  laughter  of  Youth, 
half-naked,  sweating,  proud  to  be  Hog  Butcher,  Tool 
Maker,  Stacker  of  Wheat,  Player  with  Railroads,  and 
Freight  Handler." 

In  Chicago  there  is  the  mysterious  something  that 
makes  for  individuality,  personality,  charm;  in  Chi 
cago  a  spirit  broods  upon  the  face  of  the  waters. 
Find  a  writer  who  is  indubitably  an  American  in 
every  pulse-beat,  an  Amercan  who  has  something 
new  and  peculiarly  American  to  say  and  who  says  it 
in  an  unmistakably  American  way,  and  nine  times 


THE    LITERARY    CAPITAL  35 

out  of  ten  you  will  find  that  he  has  some  sort  of 
connection  with  the  gargantuan  abattoir  by  Lake 
Michigan  —  that  he  was  bred  there,  or  got  his  start 
there,  or  passed  through  there  in  the  days  when  he 
was  young  and  tender. 

It  is,  indeed,  amazing  how  steadily  a  Chicago 
influence  shows  itself  when  the  literary  ancestry  and 
training  of  present-day  American  writers  are  investi 
gated.  The  brand  of  the  sugar-cured  ham  seems  to 
be  upon  all  of  them.  With  two  exceptions,  there  is 
not  a  single  American  novelist  of  the  younger  gen 
eration  —  that  is,  a  serious  novelist,  a  novelist  de 
serving  a  civilized  reader's  notice  —  who  has  not 
sprung  from  the  Middle  Empire  that  has  Chicago 
for  its  capital.  I  nominate  the  two  exceptions  at 
once :  Abraham  Cahan,  Lithuanian  Jew,  always 
vastly  more  Russian  than  American,  and  James 
Branch  Cabell,  last  survivor  of  the  old  aristocracy 
of  the  South.  All  the  rest  have  come  from  the  Chi 
cago  palatinate :  Dreiser,  Anderson,  Miss  Cather, 
Mrs.  Watts,  Tarkington,  Wilson,  Herrick,  Patter 
son,  even  Churchill.  It  was  Chicago  that  produced 
Henry  B.  Fuller,  the  pioneer  of  the  modern  Amer 
ican  novel.  It  was  Chicago  that  inspired  and  de 
veloped  Frank  Norris,  its  first  practitioner  of  genius. 
And  it  was  Chicago  that  produced  Dreiser,  undoubt 
edly  the  greatest  artist  of  them  all. 

The  astounding  literary  productivity  of  Indiana, 
the  most  salient  phenomenon  of  latter-day  American 
literature,  is  largely  ascribable  to  the  influence  of 
the  inland  capital  by  the  lake.  The  limits  of  the  city 
run  almost  to  the  Indiana  frontier :  the  youth  of  the 
state  turns  to  it  instinctively;  it  as  plainly  dominates 


36  H.    L.    MENCKEN 

the  energy  and  aspiration  of  all  that  fertile  region 
as  Boston  dominates  the  six  states  of  New  England. 
From  Ade  to  Dreiser  nearly  all  the  bright  young 
Indianians  have  gone  to  Chicago  for  a  semester  or 
two,  and  not  only  the  Indianians,  but  also  the  young 
sters  of  all  the  other  Middle  Western  States.  It 
has  drawn  them  in  from  their  remote  wheat-towns 
and  far-flung  railway  junctions,  and  it  has  given  them 
an  impulse  that  New  York  simply  cannot  match  — 
an  impulse  toward  independence,  toward  honesty, 
toward  a  peculiar  vividness  and  naivete  —  in  brief, 
toward  the  unaffected  self-expression  that  is  at  the 
bottom  of  sound  art.  New  York,  when  it  lures  such 
a  recruit  eastward,  makes  a  pliant  conformist  of  him, 
and  so  ruins  him  out  of  hand.  But  Chicago,  how 
ever  short  the  time  it  has  him,  leaves  him  irrevocably 
his  own  man,  with  a  pride  sufficient  to  carry  through 
a  decisive  trial  of  his  talents. 

What  lies  at  the  bottom  of  all  this,  I  dare  say,  is 
the  elemental  curiosity  of  a  simple  and  somewhat 
ignorant  people  —  the  naive  delight  of  hog  butchers, 
freight  handlers,  the  stackers  of  wheat,  in  the  grand 
clash  and  clatter  of  ideas.  New  York  affects  a 
superior  sophistication,  and  in  part  it  is  genuine; 
Boston  is  already  senile;  Philadelphia  is  too  stupid  to 
be  interested.  But  in  Chicago  there  is  an  eager 
ness  to  hear  and  see,  to  experience  and  experiment. 
The  town  is  colossally  rich;  it  is  ever-changing;  it 
yearns  for  distinction.  The  new-comers  who  pour  in 
from  the  wheatlands  want  more  than  mere  money; 
they  want  free  play  for  their  prairie  energy;  they 
seek  more  imaginative  equivalent  for  the  stupendous 
activity  that  they  were  bred  to.  It  is  thus  a  superb 


THE    LITERARY    CAPITAL  37 

market  for  merchants  of  the  new.  And  in  particular 
it  is  a  superb  market  for  the  merchant  whose  wares, 
though  new,  have  a  familiar  air  —  which  is  to  say, 
on  the  aesthetic  plane  —  for  the  sort  of  art  that  is 
recognizably  national  in  its  themes  and  its  idioms, 
and  combines  a  Yankee  sharpness  of  observation 
with  a  homely  simplicity  —  the  sort  of  art  that  one 
finds  in  a  novel  by  Dreiser  or  a  poem  by  Sandburg 
—  the  only  sort  that  stands  free  of  imitation  and  is 
absolutely  American. 

For  such  originality  Chicago  has  a  perennial  wel 
come,  and  where  the  welcome  is,  there  the  guests  are 
to  be  found.  Go  back  twenty  or  thirty  years,  and 
you  will  scarcely  find  an  American  literary  move 
ment  that  did  not  originate  under  the  shadow  of  the 
stockyards.  In  the  eighteen-nineties  New  York 
turned  its  eyes  toward  England,  but  Chicago  had 
Savoys  of  its  own,  and  at  least  one  publishing  house 
that  grandly  proclaimed  the  doom  of  the  old  order, 
and  trotted  out  its  Fullers  and  Mary  MacLanes,  and 
imported  Ibsen  and  Maeterlinck,  then  as  strange  as 
Heliogabalus.  The  new  poetry  movement  is  thor 
oughly  Chicagoan;  the  majority  of  its  chief  poets 
are  from  the  Middle  West;  Poetry,  the  organ  of 
the  movement,  is  published  in  Chicago.  So  with  the 
little  theater  movement.  Long  before  it  was  heard 
of  in  New  York,  it  was  firmly  on  its  legs  in  Chicago. 
And  to  support  these  various  reforms  and  revolts, 
some  of  them  already  of  great  influence,  others  abor 
tive  and  quickly  forgotten,  there  is  in  Chi 
cago  a  body  of  critical  opinion  that  is  unsurpassed 
for  discretion  and  intelligence  in  America.  The 
New  York  newspapers,  in  the  main,  employ  third- 


38  H.    L.    MENCKEN 

rate  journalistic  hacks  as  dramatic  critics,  and  their 
book  reviews  are  ignorant  and  ridiculous.  But  in 
Chicago  there  is  an  abundance  of  sound  work  in  both 
fields,  and  even  the  least  of  the  newspapers  makes  a 
palpable  effort  to  be  honest  and  well-informed.  .  .  . 
So  much  for  the  Chicagoiad.  Lying  out  there 
where  the  prairie  runs  down  to  the  Great  Lakes  lies 
the  real  capital  of  the  United  States.  It  is  over 
grown,  it  is  oafish,  it  shows  many  of  the  characters 
of  the  upstart  and  the  bounder,  but  under  its  surface 
there  is  a  genuine  earnestness,  a  real  interest  in  ideas, 
a  sound  curiosity  about  the  prodigal  and  colorful  life 
of  the  people  of  the  republic.  The  literature  of  the 
country,  at  the  moment,  is  in  a  state  bordering  upon 
paralysis.  The  war  greatly  augmented  its  chronic 
imitativeness;  worse,  it  greatly  strengthened  the  Pur 
itan  machinery  for  putting  down  intellectual  experi 
ment  and  enterprise;  the  statute  books  are  heavy 
to-day  with  ferociously  repressive  laws,  and  many  of 
them  bear  harshly  on  the  man  of  letters.  But  men 
of  high  hope  look  for  a  reaction  toward  freedom  in 
ideas,  and,  what  is  more,  toward  a  sane  and  self- 
respecting  nationalism.  If  it  ever  comes,  it  will  not 
come  from  New  York:  New  York  is  too  timorous. 
It  will  come,  I  think,  from  Chicago. 

H.  L.  MENCKEN. 


Philosophy  in  America 

IN  philosophy  as  well  as  in  law  and  literature,  the 
United  States  have  remained  British  colonies. 
This  does  not  mean  that  the  gates  of  intellectual 
America  have  been  completely  shut  to  French  and 
German  thought.  The  community  of  western  civil 
ization,  which  found  in  Latin  its  common  tongue,  has 
never  been  completely  broken  up;  and  it  is  doubtful 
whether  the  philosophic  mind  or  genius  can  ever  be 
entirely  nationalized.  But  the  ties  of  a  common 
language  and  community  of  traditions  have  undoubt 
edly  withstood  a  Declaration  of  Independence,  two 
wars,  and  an  unprecedented  influx  of  foreign  peoples. 
Even  after  our  graduate  schools  had  been  organized 
on  German  models  and  a  large  number  of  those  who 
wished  to  qualify  as  teachers  had  deemed  it  neces 
sary  to  take  their  Ph.D.  in  Germany,  our  prevailing 
philosophic  modes  did  not  deviate  much  from  the 
fashions  followed  in  Great  Britain.  Our  most  in 
fluential  thinkers  like  Fiske,  James,  Dewey,  and  even 
Royce,  have  been  brought  up  in  the  tradition  set  by 
Locke,  Berkeley,  Hume  and  Mill:  and  where  Ger 
man  influence  is  undeniable,  it  has  largely  come  to 
us  through  the  mediation  of  British  thinkers,  such 
as  Coleridge,  Hamilton,  T.  H.  Green,  Bosanquet, 
and  Bradley.  The  result  is  that  one  can  pass 
from  the  pages  of  our  philosophical  reviews  to  those 
of  British  publications  without  noticing  any  general 

39 


40  MORRIS    R.     COHEN 

difference  except  perhaps  a  somewhat  higher  stand 
ard  of  philosophic  workmanship  prevailing  in  the 
latter.  The  greater  maturity  of  British  philosophic 
writings  can  partly  be  explained  by  the  external  con 
ditions  which  in  the  United  States  are  unfavorable 
for  long-sustained  and  deliberate  philosophic  com 
position.  With  few  notable  exceptions,  such  as  W. 
M.  Salter,  H.  R.  Marshall,  and  C.  A.  Strong,  our 
philosophic  writers  are  all  professional  teachers  who 
are  always  under  some  official  or  moral  pressure  to 
publish,  even  though  their  long  schedules  of  routine 
teaching,  heavy  administrative  duties,  and  inade 
quate  pay,  do  not  leave  them  much  leisure  or  free 
dom  of  mind  for  philosophic  thinking,  reading  and 
writing. 

The  recent  publication  of  Mr.  Kemp  Smith's  mag 
nificent  "  Commentary  on  Kant's  Critique  of  Pure 
Reason"  (1918),  written,  if  not  perhaps  entirely 
conceived  in  Princeton  University,  serves  to  remind 
us  that  while  British  influence  in  our  literature  has 
been  predominantly  English  and  in  the  realm  of  our 
common  law  almost  exclusively  so,  in  philosophy  the 
Scottish  influence  has  been  out  of  all  proportion  to 
the  numerical  strength  of  the  Scottish  people.  The 
natural  or  common-sense  realism  of  the  school  of 
Thomas  Reid  was  introduced  in  Princeton  by  Presi 
dent  Witherspoon,  a  Scottish  immigrant  who  be 
came  one  of  the  signers  of  our  Declaration  of  Inde 
pendence.  It  spread  in  the  beginning  of  the  nine 
teenth  century  until  it  became  the  predominant  phil 
osophy  in  America  —  remaining  so  up  to  about 
1890,  when  James  McCosh  died  at  Princeton,  Fran 
cis  Bowen  at  Harvard,  and  Noah  Porter  at  Yale. 


PHILOSOPHY    IN    AMERICA        41 

Many  reasons  can  be  assigned  for  this  peculiar  phe 
nomenon  —  the  superior  Scottish  experience  in,  and 
aptitude  for,  intellectual  controversy;  the  natural 
kinship  between  Presbyterian  theology  and  that  of 
Calvinistic  New  England;  the  decay  of  intellectual 
traditions  in  the  South  through  the  economic  decline 
of  the  older  seaboard  aristocracy;  and,  not  least, 
the  readiness  with  which  the  "  philosophy  of  com 
mon  sense  "  could  be  adopted  for  purposes  of  dog 
matic  teaching.  Being  entirely  free  from  any  sub 
tleties  or  unorthodox  views  as  to  the  nature  of  the 
material  world,  the  soul,  or  God,  it  could  easily  be 
taught  in  dogmatic  form,  and  students  could  readily 
recite  on  it.  The  social  demands  which  shape  educa 
tional  systems  have  made  the  American  college 
much  more  like  a  Scotch  college  than  anything  on  the 
Oxford  model;  i.  e.,  it  has  aimed  to  give  somewhat 
elementary  instruction  in  a  number  of  subjects  to  a 
great  many,  rather  than  intensive  training  to  a  select 
class.  Philosophy  was  thus  originally  taught  — 
usually  by  the  president  of  the  college  who  was  an 
ordained  minister  —  as  a  part  of  Christian  apolo 
getics  in  the  training  of  Christian  citizens.  For 
while  Church  and  State  have  been  separated  since  the 
end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  the  churches  have 
retained  real  control,  even  over  colleges  that  are  not 
avowedly  denominational. 

The  last  decade  of  the  nineteenth  century,  how 
ever,  witnessed  a  rapid  expansion  of  the  American 
educational  system  and  a  transformation  of  our 
leading  colleges  into  universities.  This  naturally 
created  a  demand  for  teachers  more  technically 
equipped,  even  if  more  secular.  The  teaching  of 


44  MORRIS    R.     COHEN 

existence  of  an  absolute  or  eternal  self  as  a  knower; 
and  (3)  dualists  like  Rogers,  Lovejoy,  Pratt  and 
'Drake  who,  though  they  adhere  rigidly  to  the  ordi 
nary  distinction  between  subject  and  object,  yet  in 
many  ways  follow  the  idealistic  analysis  of  knowl 
edge.  Some  years  ago,  George  Howison  and 
Thomas  Davidson  represented  a  vigorous  and  pun 
gent  form  of  pluralistic  or  personal  idealism  in  which 
the  whole  universe  appeared  as  a  democracy  or 
republic  of  free  spirits.  But  they  seem  to  have  left 
no  direct  disciples.  C.  M.  Bakewell  of  Yale  who 
was  closely  associated  with  both  of  these  men  seems 
now  a  devoted  follower  of  Royce  —  though  it  should 
be  added  that  in  Royce's  later  thought,  pluralism 
rather  than  monism  is  emphasized,  and  community 
rather  than  the  Absolute  Spirit. 

It  is  usual  to  regard  both  James  and  Dewey  as 
pragmatists,  and  doubtless  their  agreement  is  pro 
found  and  significant;  yet,  in  some  respects,  they  are 
temperamentally  at  the  opposite  poles  of  the  phil 
osophic  sphere.  While  both  have  their  roots  in 
British  utilitarianism,  and  both  follow  Peirce  in 
asserting  that  the  meaning  of  any  truth  is  to  be  found 
in  its  consequences,  James  insists  that  these  conse 
quences  must  be  particulars,  while  Dewey  insists  that 
the  process  of  knowing  must  be  practical.  Dewey 
and  his  followers  are  essentially  moralists,  inter 
ested  in  philosophy  as  a  help  to  conduct  in  bettering 
or  reforming  the  world.  James  is  a  spiritualist, 
interested  in  what  constitutes  well-being  rather  than 
well-doing.  Dewey  glorifies  the  function  of  the 
intellect  in  the  transformation  of  reality:  James 
trusts  more  to  intuition  as  a  revelation  of  reality. 


PHILOSOPHY    IN    AMERICA        45 

Thus  to  James,  pragmatism  is  a  method  whereby  the 
values  of  the  old  supernaturalism  may  still  be  main 
tained,  while  Dewey's  pragmatism  or  instrumental- 
ism  is  a  method  for  eliminating  such  concepts  as  God, 
freedom,  and  immortality  which  he  claims  have  out 
lived  their  value  as  sanctions.  Philosophy  hence 
forth  must  devote  itself  to  aid  in  transforming  our 
empirical  world. 

Nearly  all  American  pragmatists  now  are  follow 
ers  of  Dewey,  who  is  thus  the  only  American  to  have 
founded  a  new  philosophical  school.  The  number 
and  the  contagious  enthusiasm  of  his  disciples  is  con 
tinually  increasing.  The  recent  volume  of  co-oper 
ative  studies  entitled  "  Creative  Intelligence " 
(1917)  gives  a  fair  idea  of  the  achievement  as  well 
as  the  programme  of  his  school,  though  one  of  the 
studies,  that  by  Dr.  H.  M.  Kallen,  leans  more  on 
Santayana  than  on  Dewey.  Though  Dewey  himself 
disowns  the  intention,  the  Chicago  School  is  in  fact 
distinctly  hostile  to  purely  theoretic  philosophy,  to 
the  satisfaction  of  idle  curiosity  or  rational  wonder 
for  its  own  sake.  The  intellect  is  to  illumine  var 
ious  needs  and  has  no  separate  needs  of  its 
own.  But  that  one  can  sympathize  with  pragma 
tism  and  yet  not  forego  interest  in  metaphysical  or 
speculative  philosophy  has  recently  been  brilliantly 
shown  by  J.  E.  Boodin's  "  Realistic  Universe " 

(1917)- 

At  the  beginning  of  this  century  the  prevailing 
Lockean  dogma  that  the  immediate  object  of  knowl 
edge  is  always  an  idea  of  our  own,  began  to  be  vigor 
ously  assailed  both  in  England  and  in  America. 
Though  priority  in  this  respect  belongs  to  Mr.  G.  E. 


46  MORRISR.     COHEN 

Moore  of  Trinity,  the  American  pioneers  of  this 
movement,  Woodbridge,  Montague  and  Perry, 
seem  to  have  been  independently  determined  in  their 
course  —  Perry,  through  his  analysis  of  the  inade 
quacy  of  Royce's  claim  that  the  idealistic  position 
has  been  definitely  proved;  Montague,  through  con 
siderations  which  appear  in  the  Natural  Realism  of 
Thomas  Case;  and  Woodbridge,  through  the  rejec 
tion  of  the  Cartesian  tradition  that  the  mind  is  an 
independent  substance  or  bare  spectator  of  material 
nature.  In  insisting  on  a  return  to  the  Aristotelian 
notion  of  the  mind  as  a  psyche,  the  form  or  function 
of  an  organized  body  responding  to  its  environment, 
he  believed  himself  to  be  also  in  agreement  with  the 
deliverance  of  modern  physics  and  biology,  which 
indicate  that  consciousness  is  an  outgrowth  of  life 
which  has  been  gradually  evolved  on  a  globe  orig 
inally  incapable  of  bearing  it. 

Woodbridge  is  one  of  the  few  Americans  to  insist 
that  metaphysics  or  philosophy  of  nature  is  of 
greater  or  more  primary  importance  than  psychol 
ogy  or  epistemology.  The  Lockean  argument  that 
we  must  examine  the  mind  as  an  instrument  of 
knowledge  before  we  can  study  the  nature  of  things 
known  he  rejects  as  fallacious  since  we  cannot  indulge 
in  any  inquiry  as  to  the  nature  of  knowledge  without 
assuming  that  some  things  are  already  known.  The 
question  how  knowledge  in  general  is  possible  does 
not  explain  anything  in  particular;  e.g.,  why  the 
flowers  bloom  in  the  spring. 

Woodbridge  is  one  of  the  many  instances  of  Amer 
ican  scholars  and  philosophers  swallowed  up  by  the 
great  Moloch  of  American  university  administra- 


PHILOSOPHY    IN    AMERICA        47 

tion ;  but  the  neo-realistic  movement  of  which  he  has 
been  the  pioneer  has  flourished,  thanks  partly  to  the 
powerful  support  from  the  mathematical  logic  of 
Bertrand  Russell.  Indeed,  since  the  publication  of 
the  "  New  Realism"  (1912)  by  Marvin,  Perry, 
Spaulding,  Montague,  Holt,  and  Pitkin,  no  Amer 
ican  school  has  been  more  energetic.  Marvin's  "  In 
troduction  to  Metaphysics "  and  his  "  History  of 
European  Philosophy,"  Spaulding's  "  New  Nation 
alism,"  Perry's  "  Present  Tendencies  of  Philos 
ophy,"  Holt's  "  Concept  of  Consciousness,"  and 
"  The  Freudian  Wish,"  as  well  as  the  periodical 
contributions  of  Montague,  Pitkin,  and  McGilvary 
form  a  body  of  writings  not  paralleled  during  the 
same  period  by  any  other  school.  Holt,  in  partic 
ular,  has  been  effective  in  transforming  neo-realism 
from  a  mere  protest  against  the  idealistic  theory  of 
knowledge  into  a  positive  doctrine  of  neutral  mon 
ism,  holding  that  both  mental  and  physical  complexes 
ultimately  consist  of  neutral  logical  elements. 

When  we  turn  from  the  problem  of  knowledge 
and  related  psychological  issues,  to  general  meta 
physics  or  to  the  more  special  philosophical  sciences, 
such  as  logic,  ethics,  philosophy  of  history,  etc.,  there 
is  comparatively  little  to  report.  In  the  past  the 
history  of  philosophy  occupied  a  large  part  of  our 
attention,  and  the  Cornell  School,  headed  by  Creigh- 
ton,  Thilly,  Hammond  and  Albee  still  attach  great 
importance  to  such  studies.  But  the  sum  of  our 
achievement  in  this  field  is  not  to  be  compared  with 
such  work  as  that  of  Zeller,  Gomperz,  Hareau, 
Dietrici,  Benn,  Whitaker,  Burnett  or  A.  E.  Taylor. 
Still,  one  can  mention  Lovejoy's  studies  on  the  his- 


48  MORRIS    R.     COHEN 

tory  of  evolution,  Albee  on  utilitarianism,  Husik  on 
medieval  philosophy  and  Reilly  on  early  American 
philosophy,  as  notable  and  certainly  useful  contribu 
tions.  Sheldon's  recent  book,  "  The  Strife  of  Sys 
tems  "  (1918),  while  just  and  accurate  in  its  esti 
mate  and  analysis  of  contemporary  philosophical 
systems,  including  Thomism,  is  primarily  metaphysi 
cal  rather  than  historical  in  its  interest.  Carefully 
applying  the  principles  of  identity  and  diversity,  of 
external  and  internal  relations,  to  the  diverse  sys 
tems,  the  author  has  undoubtedly  made  the  most 
important  recent  contributions  to  the  neglected  field 
of  metaphysics. 

In  the  field  of  logic  proper  the  work  inaugurated 
by  Chas.  Peirce,  the  most  original  American  phil 
osopher,  is  now  generally  recognized  as  epoch-mak 
ing.  Royce's  contributions  in  this  field  may  perhaps 
prove  a  more  enduring  monument  than  his  better 
known  books.  His  pupils,  C.  I.  Lewis  of  California, 
and  H.  M.  Sheffer  of  Harvard,  are  actively  continu 
ing  this  work.  Lewis's  "  Survey  of  Symbolic 
Logic  "  (1919)  is  one  of  the  few  recent  publications 
of  which  American  scholarship  can  well  be  proud. 

In  the  field  of  ethics,  Felix  Adler's  "  Ethical  Phil 
osophy  of  Life  "  (1918)  is,  whatever  one  may  think 
of  its  Kantian  background,  certainly  a  thought-pro 
voking  and  soul-stirring  book  of  a  unique  character. 
Dewey's  "  Democracy  and  Education  "  sums  up  his 
philosophy  in  its  practical  applications  and  incident 
ally  illumines  some  of  the  dark  corners  in  his  theo 
retic  views. 

No  account  of  American  philosophy  should  fail  to 
mention  the  works  of  Santayana,  especially  his  "  Life 


PHILOSOPHY    IN    AMERICA        49 

of  Reason,"  the  most  distinctive  systematic  treatise 
on  philosophy  that  America  has  produced.  But  the 
limits  of  our  space  will  not  permit  justice  to  this 
magnificent  work.  It  must  be  remarked,  however, 
that  its  systematic  neglect  is  one  of  the  most  instruct 
ive  facts  about  American  philosophy. 

This  article  deals  with  technical  philosophy  in 
America  rather  than  with  the  philosophy  of  the 
American  people.  If  the  latter  be  a  real  entity  it 
has  had  remarkably  little  to  do  with  the  former.  A 
country  that  has  had  a  political  experience  unique  in 
the  world's  history,  has,  up  to  very  recently,  pro 
duced  almost  nothing  original  and  important  in  the 
field  of  professed  political  philosophy.  No  country 
has  more  professional  teachers  of  philosophy  and 
proportionately  fewer  readers  of  philosophic  litera 
ture  in  the  general  public.  If  the  Danish  philoso 
pher  Kirkgaard  be  right  in  his  contention  that  we  live 
forward  and  think  backward,  we  can  say  that  Amer 
ica  has  been  too  busy  building  up  a  new  continent  to 
change  its  ancient  habits  of  thought.  So  far  as  a 
cloistered  observer  can  tell,  the  great  mass  of  the 
American  people  are  either  absorbed  in  questions  of 
an  immediately  practical  bearing,  or  else  in  religious 
thought  of  a  traditionally  pietistic  character.  If  the 
tired  strenuous  business  man  takes  to  philosophy  in 
his  leisure  moments,  he  is  most  likely  to  take  up  with 
the  New  Thought  movement,  which  also  interests 
his  more  leisured  wife.  This  diluted  theosophy  or 
neo-platonism  is  actually  the  most  popular  philosophy 
in  America.  It  shows  results.  It  brings  to  men 
and  women  solace,  comfort  and  success,  and  satis 
fies  in  a  quasi-intellectual  way  the  yearning  for  the 


50  MORRISR.     COHEN 

Beyond  which  is  ever  the  Nemesis  of  worldliness. 
If  the  reader  is  inclined  to  scoff  at  and  ignore  the 
genuine  human  service  which  this  New  Thought  is 
rendering,  I  hasten  to  recommend  to  him  the  "  His 
tory  of  the  New  Thought  Movement,"  edited  by 
Horatio  Dresser,  who  is  a  Harvard  Ph.D.,  an  ortho 
dox  professor  of  philosophy,  and  the  author  of  books 
which  have  probably  sold  in  larger  numbers  than 
those  of  Santayana,  Royce  and  Dewey. 

Since  the  war,  our  philosophic  periodicals  have 
been  devoting  a  larger  amount  of  space  to  questions 
of  social  philosophy,  but  so  long  as  our  philosophic 
training  is  so  inadequate  in  its  preparation  for  the 
scientific  handling  of  masses  of  facts,  we  are  not  likely 
to  produce  startling  results.  Our  teachers  of  eco 
nomics,  sociology  and  political  science  have  been 
working  in  the  main  on  the  basis  of  the  German  his 
torical  philosophy,  but  the  background  of  popular 
American  economic,  political,  and  legal  discussion  is 
still  dominated  by  our  traditional  eighteenth-century 
individualism  or  natural  law  philosophy.  The  writ 
ings  of  Roscoe  Pound,  Dean  of  the  Harvard  Law 
School,  offe'r  perhaps  the  best  promise  of  a  genuinely 
modern  contribution  to  social  philosophy. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  Western  or  European 
culture,  America  has  not  as  yet  produced  a  philos 
opher  as  influential  as  was  Gibbs  in  the  realm  of 
physics  or  Lester  Ward  in  the  realm  of  sociology. 
Though  Ward,  and  even  Gibbs,  may  well  be  counted 
among  philosophers,  this  can  be  done  only  by  dis 
regarding  the  unmistakable  tendency  to  separate 
technical  philosophy  entirely  from  physical  and  social 


PHILOSOPHY    IN    AMERICA        51 

theory.  But  James,  Dewey,  and  Baldwin  in  the 
field  of  psychology  and  education,  and  Chauncey 
Wright,  C.  S.  Peirce,  Royce  and  Santayana  in  the 
field  of  logic  and  metaphysics,  are  names  which  can 
glorify  any  country.  The  stress  of  recent  events  has 
not  brought  forth  in  America  a  thinker  as  clear, 
radical,  and  courageous  as  Bertrand  Russell;  nor 
have  we  a  philosopher  as  pre-eminent  as  Bradley, 
whose  silence  on  the  burning  issues  of  the  war  is  a 
rebuke  to  those  who  forget  that  even  in  times  of 
great  passion  it  is  not  meet  for  the  philosopher  to 
add  to  the  torrents  of  hasty  words. 

MORRIS  R.  COHEN. 


The  Recent  American  Novel 

IT  is  interesting  to  search  a  recent  volume  of  English 
critical  articles,  Mr.  Robert  Lynd's  charming  "  Old 
and  New  Masters,"  and  not  find  in  it  one  American 
novelist.  Henry  James  is  there,  but  to  Henry 
James  the  United  States  was  an  aesthetic  purgatory 
from  which  he  ascended  to  Europe.  He  is  Mr. 
Lynd's  only  American,  and  he  no  more  belongs  to 
his  native  country  than  Mr.  Conrad  to  Poland. 
What  makes  the  omission  interesting  is  not  at  all 
the  critic's  obliviousness,  if  it  is  obliviousness,  but 
the  fact  that  this  low  visibility  should  be  so  much  a 
matter  of  course.  In  the  English  eye  the  American 
novel  is  not  yet  significant.  It  exists.  For  the 
curious  everything  exists.  But  it  has  not  taken  on  a 
very  distinct  and  salient  character.  More,  undoubt 
edly,  than  the  novels  of  Canada  and  Australia,  or, 
for  that  matter,  the  novels  of  Jamaica  and  Malta; 
but  not  immeasurably  more.  And  it  cannot  be  ex 
plained  by  saying  that  critics  like  Mr.  Lynd  are  too 
hard  to  please.  He  at  least  has  a  place  for  James 
Elroy  Flecker  and  for  Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham. 

This  failure  of  the  American  novel  to  leap  the 
critical  Atlantic,  observable  elsewhere  than  in  Mr. 
Lynd,  may  partly  be  accounted  for  by  the  habit  of 
English  readers.  Even  genius  has  had  its  difficul 
ties  about  arriving  from  Scandinavia  and  Russia,  or 
crossing  the  Irish  Channel  or  the  Straits  of  Dover. 

52 


THE    AMERICAN    NOVEL  53 

But  granted  the  polite  stare  that  meets  the  outsider, 
and  the  sedate  readers  behind  it,  there  are  certain 
peculiarities  in  the  nature  of  the  American  novel 
which  indicate  to  some  degree  its  comparative  failure 
to  define  itself. 

The  chief  of  these  peculiarities,  as  many  see  them, 
is  (in  the  jargon  of  the  psycho-analyst)  an  inferior 
ity  complex.  This  neurotic  sense  of  inferiority  does 
not  directly  affect  the  great  thriving  class  of  fiction- 
manufacturers  which  is  common  to  England  and  the 
United  States.  Novel-makers  like  Robert  W. 
Chambers,  George  Barr  McCutcheon,  Gene  Strat- 
ton  Porter,  Owen  Johnson,  the  Pollyanna  lady, 
Harold  McGrath,  Thomas  Dixon,  and  the  incredible 
Harold  Bell  Wright,  are  simply  exponents  of  a  form 
of  business  enterprise  to  be  grouped  with  the  jam 
and  pickle  business  of  Crosse  and  Blackwell,  that 
has  nothing  to  do  with  art.  Even  men  like  Rupert 
Hughes  and  Samuel  Merwin  and  Meredith  Nichol 
son,  who  understand  fiction  as  an  art,  are  not  free 
from  the  taint  of  business  enterprise  in  arranging 
their  creations.  But  the  American  novelist  as  artist, 
the  man  of  aesthetic  significance,  is  subordinated  in 
a  much  subtler  respect.  He  is  the  victim,  ill  or 
convalescent,  of  what  Mr.  Santayana  has  perfectly 
termed  the  "genteel  tradition  ";  and  this  tradition 
is  the  outcome  of  a  national  timidity  —  a  sense  of 
aesthetic  inferiority. 

If  one  were  to  go  to  the  source  of  this  tradition, 
one  would  have  to  analyze  Puritanism  as  well  as 
Colonialism;  and  nothing  of  America's  ungracious 
religiousness  and  provincialism,  succeeded  by  com 
mercial  hurry  and  bustle,  could  be  left  out.  But 


54  FRANCIS    HACKETT 

these  are  only  indirect  and  indeed  debatable  con 
tributing  factors,  and  it  is  to  the  influence  of  the 
American  college  and  the  critics  bred  by  the  Amer 
ican  college,  that  the  genteel  tradition  is  more 
directly  to  be  ascribed.  At  one  time,  the  period  of 
the  transcendentalists,  there  was  a  possibility  that  a 
culture  might  be  formed  for  the  nation  which  would 
permit  the  partial  emancipation  of  the  American 
spirit  in  the  severe  and  almost  forbidding  presence  of 
classical  culture.  But  before  this  civilized  and  civ 
ilizing  culture  was  established,  the  Civil  War  came, 
and  with  it  the  expansion  of  the  railroads  and  the 
incursion  of  the  immigrants.  A  hasty  national 
homogeneity  was  then  quickly  developed  —  of  rapid 
transit,  cheap  newspapers,  standardized  clothing, 
national  advertising,  big  business,  hotels,  theaters, 
summer  resorts,  "  mail  order  "  houses,  good  plumb 
ing,  universal  tooth-brushes,  Ford  cars  and  Evinrude 
engines.  This  machine-process  homogeneity,  with 
telegraph  and  telephone  and  rotary  press  and  mov 
ing  picture  to  speed  it  on,  outran  the  most  desperate 
of  efforts  toward  cultivation.  To  any  one  who  has 
seen  them,  the  New  York  elevated  railway  structures 
are  alone  enough  to  indicate  the  untutored  energy 
which  the  transcendentalists  had  failed  to  harness. 
It  was  energy,  however,  that  really  needed  direction 
from  the  aesthetic  monitors  of  the  country,  or  if  not 
direction,  then  impregnation.  But  these  monitors, 
chillily  comparing  the  barbarism  around  them  to  the 
classicism  across  the  ocean,  had  little  better  to  offer 
than  repression. 

In  view  of  the  immense  prestige  of  English  fiction 
in  America  through  the  latter  part  of  the  nineteenth 


THE    AMERICAN    NOVEE  '$$ 

century,  with  American  professors  and  critics  and 
editors  maintaining  this  prestige,  the  Atlantic  sea 
board  was  frigid  to  native  fiction.  The  New  Eng 
land  short  story  grew,  bare  and  wind-beaten  and 
close  to  the  ground,  but  only  William  Dean  Howells, 
from  Ohio,  could  write  an  eager  assured  story  like 
u  A  Boy's  Town,"  or  a  profoundly  illuminating  ver 
sion  of  current  life  like  "  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham." 
There  were  competent  storytellers  North  and  South, 
and  a  few  really  skillful  and  delightful  ones,  but  out 
side  Mr.  Howells,  the  novel  in  the  East  was  thinly 
derivative.  It  would  have  been  hard  in  any  case,  I 
suppose,  to  devise  against  a  shifting  American  back 
ground  such  rooted  and  rounded  histories  of  men 
and  women  as  the  nineteenth-century  taste  in  novels 
demanded.  To  give  to  American  society  the  living- 
ness  that  American  readers  were  finding  in  Turgenev 
and  Meredith,  and  Tolstoi  and  Hardy,  called  for 
something  not  yet  quite  sure  in  common  conscious 
ness —  American  society  itself.  For  that  reason 
the  one  clear  success,  though  at  first  purely  popular, 
was  Mark  Twain's,  whose  country  and  whose  rich 
expression  of  it  was  unlike  anything  European. 

At  the  head  of  respectable  novelists  at  present 
stands  Winston  Churchill,  a  robust  exponent  of  the 
"  genteel  tradition."  With  him,  fresher  and  less 
platitudinous,  are  to  be  reckoned  Ernest  Poole, 
author  of  "  The  Harbor,"  H.  K.  Webster,  author  of 
"  The  Great  Adventure,"  William  Allen  White,  who 
wrote  "  A  Certain  Rich  Man,"  and  Henry  Sydnor 
Harrison,  of  u  Queed."  Ellen  Glasgow,  Mary 
Johnston  of  "  The  Long  Roll,"  and  the  mellifluous 
James  Lane  Allen,  are  representatives  of  the  same 


56  FRANCIS    HACKETT 

class.  Judge  Robert  Grant,  who  wrote  "  The  Chip 
pendales/'  is  rather  more  platitudinous  than  Winston 
Churchill  and  decidedly  more  fatigued.  Mrs. 
Wharton  is  also  fatigued,  but  for  all  her  low  temper 
ature  and  the  social  furs  with  which  she  clothes  it, 
she  is  not  without  high  distinction.  Not  so  distin 
guished  is  Mrs.  Katherine  Fullerton  Gerould,  yet 
her  short  stories,  "  Vain  Oblations,"  and  others, 
exhibit  a  fine  talent  marred  by  snobbishness.  Much 
more  important,  though  unwieldy  and  clayey,  is  the 
Easterner,  Robert  Herrick,  who  wrote  "  The  Com 
mon  Lot "  and  "  Together,"  in  Chicago.  All  of 
this  group,  however,  may  be  said  to  be  subordinate 
as  artists.  Not  one  of  them  is  so  affluent  in  nature 
or  so  radiant  in  inspiration  as  to  overcome  the  heavy 
hand  of  Puritanic  repression  or  the  cold  hand  of 
gentility. 

But  beyond  the  Alleghany  Mountains  one  notes  a 
different  aesthetic  spirit.  Whatever  individuality  is 
to  be  found  in  the  American  novel,  at  all  comparable 
with  that  of  the  Russian  or  the  French  novel  of 
yesterday,  has  been  won  by  men  and  women  with  the 
outlook  of  the  pioneer.  In  many  cases  theirs  has 
been  less  a  lyrical  naturalness  than  a  violent  revul 
sion  against  gentility,  but  even  where  it  has  been  a 
conscious  revolt  it  has  had  something  in  it  of  the 
verve  of  a  new  society,  a  society  not  digging  deep 
into  its  human  soil  but  at  least  superficially  excited 
and  strenuous  in  action. 

The  novel  is,  first  of  all,  the  personality's,  but  is  it 
by  accident  that  California  bred  Jack  London  and 
Frank  Norris?  California  is  neither  colonial  nor 
genteel,  and  it  gave  easy  birth  to  "  The  Octopus," 


THE    AMERICAN    NOVEL  $J 

Norris's  brilliant  story  of  warfare  against  railroad 
monopoly,  and  "  McTeague,"  his  magnificent  study 
of  an  energized  brute.  Mrs.  Atherton  is  also  a 
Californian  and  in  some  sense  a  free  novelist,  but  not 
even  Jack  London,  an  open-handed  man  who  wrote 
beyond  his  literary  means,  had  the  primal  novelist 
instinct  of  Frank  Norris. 

In  and  around  the  newspaper  offices  of  the  Middle 
West,  however,  has  developed  that  group  of  Ameri 
can  novelists  whose  experience  defied  the  virus  of 
respectability.  The  most  titantic  is  Theodore  Drei 
ser,  much  more  fuscous  than  Frank  Norris,  but  also 
much  more  obedient  to  that  rude  experience  of  life 
which  the  moralist  and  the  leader-writer  are  always 
asking  the  writer  of  fiction  to  betray.  "  Sister 
Carrie  "  remains  perhaps  his  best  novel.  David 
Graham  Phillips,  another  man  from  Indiana,  had 
persistence  and  strength,  but  no  pliancy  and  no 
inflection  of  tone.  He  dilated  rather  than  imag 
ined.  Brand  Whitlock,  now  ambassador  to  Belg- 
ium>  wrote  several  excellent  novels  of  politics  and 
prison  life,  "  The  Thirteenth  District "  being  a 
quietly  veristic  study  of  the  profession  of  machine- 
politics.  Upton  Sinclair,  an  Easterner  who  has 
moved  west  by  natural  law,  showed  in  "  The 
Jungle  "  and  "  Love's  Pilgrimage  "  a  more  extreme 
form  of  naturalistic  revolt  than  any  of  his  contem 
poraries,  but  ungoverned  by  any  real  sense  of  the 
disinterestedness  of  art.  A  late  comer  is  Sherwood 
Anderson,  author  of  "  Windy  McPherson's  Son," 
"  Marching  Men,"  and  "  Winesburg,  Ohio  " —  a 
naturalist  with  a  skirl  of  music  haunting  him.  And 
another  is  the  Jewish  editor,  Abraham  Cahan,  whose 


58  FRANCIS    HACKETT 

"  David  Levinsky  "  is  a  crude  but  vehemently  honest 
report  of  the  processes  of  the  melting  pot. 

Because  most  of  these  men  were  newspaper  writ 
ers,  and  consequently  in  the  thick  of  American  activ 
ity,  they  naturally  resisted  and  resented  the  genteel 
tradition.  But  being  newspaper  men,  to  a  certain 
extent  bored  outsiders  as  regards  the  regular  run 
of  life  and  cynical  insiders  as  regards  character  and 
reputation,  and  yet  credulous  insiders  as  regards  the 
gigantesque  and  the  spectacular  immediately  sur 
rounding  them,  their  revolt  against  gentility  has  been 
open  to  aesthetic  attack  from  the  old  guard.  Yet  it 
must  be  said  that  those  whose  spirit  was  conceivably 
finer  have  proved  less  viable.  Henry  B.  Fuller, 
whose  "  The  Cliff-Dwellers  "  and  "  With  the  Pro 
cession  "  focussed  Chicago  so  justly  and  so  sensi 
tively  twenty  years  ago,  made  his  escape  to  Italy  and 
to  silence.  Booth  Tarkington,  the  romancer  from 
Indiana,  has  hovered  more  closely  over  his  era,  but 
has  never  quite  alighted.  The  same  may  be  said  of 
Hamlin  Garland,  who  wrote  "  Rose  of  Butchers 
Coolly  "  and  lately  "  A  Son  of  the  Middle  Border," 
and  of  Stewart  Edward  White,  whose  "  The  Blazed 
Trail "  is  memorable.  Two  other  writers,  Miss 
Willa  Gather  and  James  Branch  Cabell,  are  said  to 
have  an  art  all  their  own,  but  I  have  not  yet  read 
them. 

What  is  the  upshot?  A  cluster  of  common  assoc 
iations  is  accumulating  for  cultivated  Americans,  but 
the  upholders  of  the  genteel  tradition  are  still  inim 
ical  to  any  except  the  recognized  European  accent. 
The  Puritans,  on  the  other  hand,  resist  everything 
that  is  not  purposeful  or  edifying.  Meanwhile  the 


THE    AMERICAN    NOVEL  59 

men  who  disregard  these  prejudices,  who  face  the 
raw  United  States  with  a  desperate  resolution  to 
subdue  it  to  the  novel,  have  not  as  yet  succeeded 
indubitably.  And,  as  they  struggle,  dramatic  and 
narrative  energy  has  poured  headlong  into  the  chan 
nels  of  poetry.  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Robert  Frost, 
Vachel  Lindsay,  Amy  Lowell,  and  even  Edwin 
Arlington  Robinson,  have  put  into  new  form  those 
expressions  of  American  reality,  or  their  own  reality 
in  terms  of  America,  which  in  another  society  might 
well  have  found  form  in  fiction.  But  it  is  in  verse, 
not  in  fiction,  that  young  America  is  seeking  to  ex 
press  itself.  There  are  in  the  United  States  no  such 
novelists  coming  up  as  Beresford,  Mackenzie,  Swin- 
nerton,  Miss  Richardson,  Miss  Delafield,  Joyce. 

But  the  possibilities  of  the  American  novel  are 
still  practically  untouched.  One  new  development 
of  the  novel,  the  egoistic  form  of  Joyce,  may  easily 
invite  the  men  who  are  repressed  in  other  directions. 
If  the  novel  can  desert  the  community  and  the  clan, 
to  become  the  intensive  history  of  personality  and 
personal  contacts,  then  the  young  American  literary 
artist  may  quickly  make  himself  at  home.  But 
granted  that  this  is  a  limited  possibility,  out  of  the 
democratic  form  of  the  Dreiser  novel  may  come  a 
much  deeper  and  more  beautiful  expression.  The 
Dreiser  novel  may  be  only  a  chrysalis,  preserving  the 
novel  until  it  has  conquered  not  only  the  gentility  but 
the  fear  of  free  individuality  which  is  still  the  great 
est  enemy  of  American  art. 

FRANCIS  HACKETT. 

THE   END 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


RENEWED  BOOKS  ARE  SUBJECT  TO  IMMEDIATE 
RECALL 


LIBRARY,  UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  DAVIS 

Book  Slip-70m-9,'65(F7151s4)458 

THE  FREEMAN 

B.  W.  HUEBSCH,  President 
NEW    YORK 


j  MR.  ALBERT 
pnsibility  and 
a.ted,  especial- 
velopments  in 

he  discussion 
onomics.  In 
it  concerns 
litical  events, 

the  economic 

liar  sentiment 
and  unifying 
t  is  grounded 
be  performed 
n,  and  that  a 
do  no  better 

respect  the 
iccuracy,  im- 
in  any  sense 
ly  resume  of 
ins  of  special 
srving  a  large 

>ressed,  upon 
i  and  foreign 

;r  may  be  ob- 
riptions  rates 
;  in  Canada, 
^.oo.  Or  you 


Syracuse, 
Stockton, 


i  /  L 


Hackett,  F. 

On  American  books. 


PS221 
H3 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY   OF   CALIFORNIA 
DAVIS 


